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The Boston Red Sox swept the Florida Marlins Tuesday March 6th in Jupiter, Florida. The score was tied in the ninth 6 to 6 making extra innings necessary. Boston did not let the Marlins score at all in the 10th bringing the final score 14 to 6, Boston. First baseman gloves had to be on fire with all of these outs against Florida!

Enough can not be said about Daisuke Matsuaka, throwing a fastball estimated at 91-93 MPH. He threw a total of 47 pitches, 31 strikes reaching a low speed of only 71 MPH. Matsuaka threw a curveball of 74-77 MPH, a change-up of 76-78 MPH and a slider of 81-82 MPH. He was replaced with Joel Pinero in the 4th who prevented Florida from scoring the entire inning. Manny Delcarmen was not as lucky as the two pitchers before him having Ramirez score a home run for the Marlins in the 5th bringing the score to 2-1. Competing for the 5th rotation spot, Yusmeiro Petit came to the mound for the Marlins. Petit pitched for 3 innings getting with no walks, 1 hit and 5 strikes. Next in the 4th pitching was Wes Obermueller. Wes got a 1 walk and 2 hits total with a run in the 4th. Felix Rodriguez came to the mound in the 7th, getting 2 runs.

The Red Sox came back in the extra inning of this game scoring 8 runs in the 10th. Joe McEwing, Jacoby Elisbury and Bobby Scales all hit RBI singles with McEwing scoring another RBI single in the 9th. Ed Rogers hit a single in the 7th but later on in the 8th was hit by a pitch with the bases full. Kerry Robinson scored a double in that inning and made the 1st hit of the night for the Sox in the 4th inning. Brandon Moss had an RBI double in the 8th and Jeff Bailey a 2 run double. Jason Varitek scored from the 2nd in the 4th with the help of Dustin Pedroia hitting an infield single. Chad Spann in the 9th with 2 outs hit an RBI single tying up the score to go into extra innings.

The Florida Marlins had trouble scoring at the plate in the 10th leading to their loss to the Red Sox. Dan Uggla was the first Major League batter to hit a single against Matsuaka in the 1st inning. John Gall also hit a double off of Daisuke, also known as the ‘Japanese Sensation’, with runners at 2nd and 3rd. Hanley Ramirez managed to get a 2 run homer in the 5th but was not able to get his hard liner past Matsuaka in the 3rd, stopping him from getting a single. Brett Carroll hit an RBI single in the 8th and Alejandro De Aza scored with a 2-out RBI double in the 9th. Robert Andino complimented that with a 2 run double in the ninth.

All in all, a solid outing by the Red Sox Matsuaka and some timely hitting propelled them to victory!

Scott Peters is an avid baseball and more specifically Red Sox fan. You can visit his site at http://www.baseball-softball-gloves.com/fibagl.html.

Any die-hard baseball fan needs good baseball storage. Having good and adequate baseball equipment can mean the difference in the beloved game. All the component parts must be made out of high-quality equipment which you can trust will never let you down. Keeping that gear in the best possible condition is a wise step toward protecting your investment.

Now let’s talk a little bit about your baseball glove. As already mentioned before, you need to make sure that your glove is made out of high-quality material. This can give a really important boost to the quality of your play, so don’t overlook this.

One of the most important things you need to do is research, meaning you need to look for price ranges in different manufacturers, and check their quality/price ratio. After you’ve selected a few brands in your mind, head to the store.

At the store you will have to go through the very important process of trying baseball gloves on. Making sure they feel right is crucial. They need to be comfortable, as you don’t want to feel any bit of unnecessary discomfort during the game.

In the buying decision-making, you need to ask yourself a simple question: are you (or do you want to become) a baseball professional, or you are just playing around for fun with your friends? The gloves which you could buy are different in the two cases, for obvious reasons.

A professional would need high-quality gloves, which cost considerably more. For example, a good catcher’s glove may be up to a few hundred dollars. If you are not a professional, you might find this price curve a little bit too steep, as well as unnecessary.

Also, let’s not forget that more and more women are taking up this all-time favorite sport. Although, for whatever reasons, finding good women baseball gloves may be a challenge, probably because baseball gloves manufacturers still have the man’s version as a priority on their production lists.

And because having comfortable gloves will surely make your playing better, a woman needs to find smaller gloves that would fit a woman’s smaller hand. A woman needs to look for smaller finger stalls, and an adjustable wrist strap is always the best option.

When it comes to first base gloves, any professional baseball player will tell you without any doubt that they are absolutely essential to high performance playing. The first baseman uses these gloves and they need to be made out of high quality material if one’s playing is to be good.

When trying the glove on, you need to feel it and see how it reacts. It needs to be comfortable and you need to be able to take it off quickly, meaning you can open and close it in an instant.

Tips, advice and guidelines for professional baseball equipment care

http://www.baseballstorage.com

Storage techniques and recommendations for baseball collectibles and quality gear

http://www.baseballstorage.com

A boy may have a strong arm and know all the mechanics of pitching, but if he doesn’t think about the hitter’s weaknesses and strengths, he’ll become nothing more than a “thrower” and will not help his team much.

A pitcher, even more than a catcher or manager, will know which of his deliveries the batter can or cannot hit. That is, if he studies the hitter constantly. This is just as true in Little League ball as it is in the Major Leagues. As a matter of fact, the younger the hitters are, the more faults they have. Thus, the young pitcher has a great advantage if he thinks about the hitters. Here are some general principles to follow.

Try to get “ahead” of the batter with the first pitch. That doesn’t mean to groove the ball waist high and over the center of the dish. That means get the ball in the strike zone where you think the batter is weakest. If the batter stands so far away from the plate that his bat will not reach the outside corner, there is only one thing to do – pour that fast ball over the outside! If the hitter crowds the plate, fire it over his fists! Now then, if he looks strong at the plate and you know nothing about him, your best pitch is always low and outside or high and inside. Once around the league, the average pitcher should know something about the hitters. Don’t worry about not learning all there is to know about every hitter. If you find one or two with weaknesses and can get them out consistently, you’ve made a good start.

The “situation” (as covered in Chapter 16) tells the pitcher a great deal about what to throw. If he expects a sacrifice, for example, he should pitch high, which will increase the possibility of a pop-up.

If a runner on 3rd streaks for home on a “suicide squeeze” play, he has to keep the ball away from the batter and put it where the catcher can make the tag. (Throwing at the feet of a right-handed batter is recommended; pitch-out if a lefty is at the plate.)

If the pitcher suspects a steal, he shouldn’t throw a slow curve but stick to the fast ball.

When a pitcher has a 3-ball 2-strike count on a hitter, he should go to his best pitch. If his “best” is the curve, use the curve. It it’s the fast ball, use the fast ball. Remember, though, that the “best pitch” may vary from game to game.

Try not to throw the same pitch twice in a row. Change speeds. Move the ball around the strike zone, always shooting at the corners. In doing this, your objective is to upset the hitter’s timing. This is especially important when the pitcher faces the league’s best hitters. The long foul, remember, is just another strike.

The pitcher who gets two quick strikes on the hitter should “waste” the next one by putting it where the batter can’t possibly hit it.

Don’t curve ball a weak hitter! Don’t let up on a weak hitter! If the hitter is really weak, the fast ball can overpower him usually. If you throw the curve, you’re throwing a slow speed pitch and it may be the only one this hitter can get his bat on.

If you’re getting a hitter out regularly with one pitch, don’t start experimenting with another.

If you’re striking a lot of batters out and the game is going well for you, keep that pitching foot on the rubber and pitch as fast as the umpire will let you. On the other hand, if things are going bad, stall all you can to “cool off” the opposition.

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George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees, is spot on by calling out his management team and players for their poor performance thus far this season. He’s also correct in pointing out that the season is still relatively young. There is still a lot of playing left for the boys of summer.

Perhaps understandably, many New York fans have started to demand the firing of team manager Joe Torre.

Many others complain that the true responsibility for this baseball season’s terrible play rest on General Manager Brian Cashman’s shoulders, as he’s the one who put together such a high-salaried and poor-performing team.

And then there are the fans who look to the field, and rightly or wrongly, declare that the Yankees simply don’t have enough pitching.

Whatever the cause, the darkest sign is that online sportsbooks are starting to pitch the Yankees as the heavy underdogs, given their poor win-loss results to date.

Unfortunately, what so many people are missing is that, although sports is a highly emotional undertaking, it’s also a business. And that means it is important to bring a high level of reason to the field.

It’s amazing that, no matter how strategic or rational individual might be, when you shift to the sports arena, an immediate drop in IQ seems inevitable. Why? Because emotion inevitably intrudes on decision-making.

Fortunately, and despite many of his past follies, Steinbrenner is absolutely correct in standing behind his management team and the New York Yankee baseball players under them. He’s not betting on sports, he’s investing in a sports franchise. That means being strategic, making his player picks and management picks carefully.

Steinbrenner didn’t let the team off the hook; far from it. In a recent statement, he told the world he is demanding better results. Better results from his GM, from his team manager, and most certainly, better from his players.

And you can bet that a sports team owner understands the importance of performance.

Much as in the business world, Steinbrenner is saying his sports team is directly responsible for the results on the field. And I would wager that the odds are high that if performance doesn’t improve substantially very soon, we are going to see a big change to the team’s future.

As Steinbrenner points out: “It is time to see if people are ready to step up and accept their responsibilities. Let’s get going.”

Another similarity between sports and business is that that managers tend to get too much credit when things are good and too much blame when they aren’t. They of course have a large roll to play; but they are not the only pieces of the puzzle.

Finally, my argument comes down to one point: it really is still a very young season. And that makes all the difference in the sports world.

So for all you New York Yankee fans out there, remember: it is much too early to panic. Although the Yankees are currently in last place, there is still more that 80 percent of the season left to be played. While the desire to pin the blame on someone is understandably quite high, keep in mind that decisions should be made on a rational, not emotional, basis. There’s simply too much at risk to bet the whole season on a few misplayed games.

Michael Lee-Smith enjoys watching football, hockey and basketball, and particularly enjoys betting on sports online at sites such as the Bodog Sportsbook found at http://www.bodog.com/sportsbook/.

Like life in traditional society, but unlike football and basketball, the other two major American team sports, baseball is not governed by the clock and amazes many foreigners that it is the “national sport” in a fast-paced United States. Being a very popular team sport, apart from North America also in Latin America, the Caribbean and East Asia, baseball is a bat-and-ball game in which a pitcher throws a fist-sized hard ball past the hitting area of a batter.

The batter, who belongs to the other team, then attempts to hit the ball with a smooth, cylindrical bat made of wood or metal. The team will score only when the batter manages to successfully batting the ball and then runs over four markers existing on the diamond-shaped baseball field, placed on a ninety feet distance from each other and called bases, while his opponents try at the same time to catch the ball and successfully throw it by using their hands to their teammates located at each of the four bases before the batter manages to cover the last ninety feet and reach the last base.

While a football game comprises exactly sixty minutes of play and a basketball game forty or forty-eight minutes, baseball has no set game duration. The pace of the game is therefore leisurely and unhurried, like the world was once, before the deadlines, schedules and hour wages. As a matter of fact, baseball belongs to that time when people had all day to play a game. Much like traditional rural life, baseball proceeds according to the rhythm of nature, specifically the rotation of the Earth around itself and the Sun. In fact, during its early years, baseball was not played during the night, which meant that this traditional leisure game was over before sunset at the latest.

Today, the baseball season follows a traditional pace, following the cycle of the active part of the agricultural year. Baseball season begins with the coming of spring, stretches through the long hot days of the summer, and culminates, like the growing season with its harvest, in the fall. From November through March, baseball players were inactive once, but now most of them migrate to the warmer climates of Central and South America.

Finally, just as rural societies everywhere observed the three phases of the growing season with festivals, so does baseball. There is the opening day of the season marked by the arrival of spring. Then the annual All-Star Game matching the best players from the two major leagues comes in midsummer, and last in October, the baseball championship competition called “World Series,” often called the “fall classic,” begins.

With worldwide famous players, like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, baseball’s golden age transformed these sports athletes to epic figures who inspired many and reminded people why keeping our roots alive should be considered of extreme importance. In fact, a measure of baseball’s standing at the heart of American life is its transcendence of the boundary between popular and high culture.

More than the other two favorite American sports, baseball has had a “crossover appeal,” attracting interest from groups with little else in common. It is first and foremost a form of popular entertainment. But it has also been the subject of serious literally treatment and rigorous quantitative analysis. In the national life of the United States, baseball has made a place for itself in both the arts and sciences.

Jonathon Hardcastle writes articles for http://baseballstuff.net/ – In addition, Jonathon also writes articles for http://everythingaboutgames.org/ and http://universeofentertainment.com/