Wednesday Post

I am doing a freewrite today. I don’t know what to write about really, so I’ll just go. I like to play softball. It is my favorite sport and I have played it since I was five. I am a pitcher and an outfielder primarily, but sometimes I play infield as well. I also enjoy hitting. I have hit two home runs and I hopefully will hit more at some point. I love pitching. It is exciting and engaging for me, and I enjoy the intensity of it. I like having such a high level of involvement in the game. It can be stressful at times, because so much of the game depends on you as a pitcher, but it is also very rewarding. I enjoy having that big of a part in the team’s performance. Yes, there will be days when you let your team down, but the days you love as a pitcher are the days when you help bring your team a victory.

Pitching requires a lot of focus. It takes a lot of mental ffort as well as physical. You have to have excellent technique consistently in order to be successful, and it takes a lot of practice. I am sixteen now and I have pitched since I was eight years old. I love it. Pitching takes a lot of attention to detail as well. It is important that you are able to pitch to very precise targets. You don’t just want to throw the ball in the strike zone, because if you throw a ball right down the middle almost any decent hitter is going to cream it. You want to throw to the corners of the zone, and push the umpire’s boundaries. The first inning of each game is often spent by pitchers figuring out what kind of strike zone that particular unpire has. Each umpire is a little different. Some prefer outside pitches, some low, some high, some inside. Some umpires will hardly ever even call a strike unless it’s right down the middle. These kinds of umpires are very annoying as a pitcher, becaue like I said earlier, if you throw right down the middle the batter is likely to get a very good hit. This is a struggle I have faced before; I try to throw to the corners of the zone to avoid big hits, but the ump won’t call anything that isn’t right down the middle. There are some umpires, however, that will call pretty much anything you throw. These umpires are nice to have every once in a while. They are very easy to pitch with becaue yuou don’t have to have as precise of a zone, but you also don’t want to let yourself get lazy and complacent with your spots. You want to make sure you still hit your spots even if the unpire is more lenient because you want to make sure you stay in top form for those games when you have tougher umpires.

I don’t just like softball though. I also like reading and spending time with my family. I have two little sisters, one is twelve and the other is nine. They like to read too. I like reading sci-fi and fantasy mostly, and the twelve year old sister likes murder mysteries. The nine year old reads a variety of things.

We also have a cat. His name is Batman. He is all black. We got him when hwe was about six weeks old. I was a freshman when we got him. He was a Valentine’s day present from my parents to my sisters and I. He is a very well behaved cat. My dad doesn’t like him that much, but that’s mostly just because he is allergic to cats. I am mildly allergic to cats as well, but not too bad. I am also allergic to rabbits and horses, and I have seasonal allergies. I don’t have any food allergies that I am aware of. We used to have a dog when I was younger. His name was Sam and he died when I was eight. He was a very mild mannered dog and he was a great pet. He was fourteen or fifteen when he died, I can’t remember exactly. It was very sad. My parents had had him since he was a puppy, before I was born. When I was in fourth grade we had another dog named Daisy. Daisy was a good dog, always very friendly, but she got annoying because she had a very bad habit of jumping up on you and she constantly wanted to play. We got her when she was a puppy. She was a stray that a friend of ours had found somewhere. We got rid of her after a while because we just got sick of her. She was too friendly for us I guess.

-Ellie Lane
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