Well it’s finally here and we’re chomping at the bit. After 4 days off in the ‘City of Brotherly Love’ the Xavier Baseball Brothers are ready to get back on the diamond and strap it on. We have been ready to go since the beginning of this week and are anxious to finally be able to play a game. Let’s just say this week hasn’t necessarily been long, but it hasn’t gone by too quick either. We just got back from the Rhody, LaSalle game and now officially know who we are going to play; tomorrow at 3:30 we take the field against Rhode Island for a chance to redeem ourselves against them from the series we lost a competitive 2 out of 3 games a month ago.

Today we went back out to Temple and had a light batting practice and took ground balls just to stay sharp. After the practice we headed to Camden, N.J. and Campbell’s Field to watch the Rhody and LaSalle game. You can follow us all week on goxavier.com to keep up on how and what we are doing. Jenna Wilhoit, our SID, has some video coverage and interviews all throughout the week of interesting tidbits and what we do here from Philly and Camden.

Here is a picture of the stadium we are playing in with Downtown Philly in the distant.

schmidta1@xavier.edu as always

-DS

Well so far our 11 day trip to Philly has been successful. We finished out the regular season on a high note and swept St. Joe’s on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Thursday we came out hot and won 18-1; Friday and Saturday were a little different because we used outstanding pitching and defense and won 3-2 both days.

It’s been nice having some down time in Philly since our last game on Saturday. Sunday we went to the Camden Riversharks game at Campbell’s Field, the site of the A10 tourney and the field where we played St. Joe’s last weekend. After the game we went to eat down at the world famous Pat’s and Geno’s in South Philly, which is the home to the first ever Philly cheesesteak places. After we ate we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, not necessarily to look at the art, but because they were the steps that Sylvester Stallone made famous in the movie Rocky.

After having an off day from baseball completely on Sunday, yesterday we had a light practice at Temple and got to watch our pitchers take some batting practice at the end of practice. Our pitchers are rewarded with batting practice when they throw a shutout and they finally received it yesterday for the 2 shutout they threw a few weekends ago. After our light workout we headed to Lakewood, New Jersey to see former teammate Danny Rosenbaum and his Hagerstown Sun single A affiliated team play the Lakewood Blue Claws. It was nice to see Danny and we enjoyed a game in an unbelievable minor league stadium.

Today we had another practice at Temple. It was a more serious and harder working practice today as we took batting practice and faced some live pitching before we taper off and just have batting practice and take some ground balls tomorrow. We checked into our new hotel in Downtown Philly after an hour and 20 minute long drive for a 15 mile ride from Temple’s field to the city. Traffic here is unbelievable and I think we hit every single light we drove through.

Tomorrow calls for a light practice back out at Temple’s field. We’re leaving the hotel around 10:00 am and then heading across the river to Camden, N.J. to watch the LaSalle and Rhody game at 3:30. We face the winner. We’re starting to get antsy and real excited, which is a great sign. I’m very confident in our team and you can kind of just feel the energy in the atmosphere when you’re at the park. I can’t wait to get out to the field on Thursday and take it to whoever we play. If you’re around Philadelphia or the New Jersey area and you’re a Muskie fan we’d love to see you out at Campbell’s Field in Camden. We could use all support we can get in going for our 2nd striaght championship and trip to the NCAA Regional.

It has been a very short four years at Hayden Field, on the campus of Xavier University. It was somewhat of an emotional day I would have to say. The four years you’re sitting there watching the seniors get introduced on Senior Day you think to yourself that it won’t be that sad and you won’t get choked up like others in the past have, but then you get put in that situation and it’s hard not to fight back some type of tears. All that was running through my head was the long, hot hours you spent on the field in fall ball, all the memories of the past 4 years, and all the lifelong friendships you made along the way. Then your name gets called and you go out and shake the hands and give a hug to the coaches who had faith in you and took a chance on you for four years (one being my brother so it got to me just that much more). After that you go down the line and it’s hard to not have some more emotion when you hug your classmates, housemates, and ‘brothers’, Zac Richard, Neil Lindgren, and Bobby Freking (who I have been lucky to play with for the last 9 years). Needless to say it was a very touching day and an awesome weekend.

UMass came to visit and Muskie Base took care of business. We got the brooms out and swept the Minutemen back to the Northeast. Friday and Saturday we were world beaters, winning Friday 9-0 behind an outstanding outing from Tommy Shirley who threw 8.0 innings of 4 hit, shutout baseball, and taking Saturday’s game in come from behind fashion behind timely hitting, 11-6. Today was a little different; I don’t know if we were a little too confident or a little hungover from the pregame ceremonies, but we seemed to be a little sluggish. The game started weird with the home plate umpire getting hit with the 1st pitch of the bottom of the 1st inning on his hand and having to leave. We took a 1-0 lead on a groundout and then UMass took off to a 3-1 lead before we could respond. Anyways, we came back and won on a homerun in the 7th inning by Phil Bauer and got the sweep.

I don’t want to talk too early, but I have confidence in our team: we’re starting to gel and ‘click’ at the right time. We’re 7-2 in our last 9 games and find ourselves tied for 2nd place and hoping for that first round bye in the conference tournament. We head out on an 11 day road trip, first to Ohio U. on Tuesday, then straight to St. Joe’s for the final A10 series of the year on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. The tourney starts next Wednesday and hopefully we’ll be in Philly until next Sunday morning (meaning we won the championship). If GW and Richmond are reading this please help the Muskies out and take down Rhody and Charlotte for us please. We plan on heading to Philly and taking care of business and bringing back the 2nd straight A10 championship and another NCAA regional appearance.  

I can’t believe my playing days on the campus of XU are over, but I couldn’t be more thankful for my short stay in the home white unis. The days are gone in a blink of an eye and I’ll never forget the memories I made with all my teammates and friends forever. I’m proud to say that we have started to build a tradition in this program, and along with my past teammates, have laid a foreground for building a championship mentality year in and year out. While it’s getting a little sentimental here I am going to shut this post down. It’s the end of our home games, but it’s not the end of our season; we’re looking to make some more noise this season.

I want to thank all of the support from our fans here at Hayden Field, this year and the past 4 years. It was amazing the type of support we have gotten and we can’t thank all of you enough.

schmidta1@xavier.edu as always

-DS

It’s time to throw away (or sell back) the books and turn it on for the last few weekends of the season. Everything is starting to click for us and we have been playing well for the last 2 weeks. This past weekend was probably our best all around baseball of the year and it came against the #1 team in our league, Charlotte. We got great pitching and timely hitting and took the series with 2 out of 3 “W’s.” We sit in a share with 4 other teams for 3rd place, but right now we are in the driver’s seat to make the tournament; needless to say we control our own destiny.

This weekend is our last home series of the year and the last home series of my career. We open up with UMass on Friday and finish up the 3 game set on Sunday. It’s pretty emotional thinking about this being my last ever home game playing baseball. I really have never thought about it until this week, obviously. It hasn’t brought tears to my eyes yet, but to think I won’t be able to put the home uniform on again and play on Hayden Field with my teammates and friends makes you reflect on the quick 4 years. There have been many good memories with every team and I wouldn’t trade it in for anything. I would gladly do 4 more years all over again (even if I did have to go through the 95 degree Fall ball practices).

But getting sentimental will be left for another post. Now all we have to worry about right now is baseball; no school work to get in our way and distract us of our ultimate goals we set at the beginning of the year:  get to the NCAA regional. It’s funny because when I came in 4 years ago our goal was to get into the A10 tournament; the program has taken huge strides in such a short time because now our only goal is getting to the NCAA regionals. From now on a Xavier Baseball season will be disappointing unless we reach a regional. Soon enough seasons will be disappointing when we don’t make Super Regionals. After this weekend I was reassured (and now very very confident) that we definitely have a very good chance of repeating as A10 tourney champs and making our 2nd straight trip to the NCAA tournament. It would be the most incredible turn around I have ever been apart of in sports if we can do it, but I know we have the talent to get it done. We have played the best teams in our league so far and took them down 2 out of 3 and should have had 2 out of 3 from Rhody.

The thing about baseball that really gets under my skin is the fact that it is the most uncontrollable sport ever. Once the ball leaves the pitchers’ hand or leaves a bat there’s no which way to tell how the ball is going to bounce or where it could fall. Every year towards the end of the year I reflect on games we literally should have won; but this year is different because we really haven’t caught a break at all this year, so there is a lot of reflecting on should haves (I believe we really should at least be 25-24 right now). Baseball is really a sport that can test a person’s character and give someone a chance to grow up and mature moreso than any other sport. Baseball is a good life test for patience, confidence, consistency, and resilience. I would honestly say, and I’m sure many would argue with me, but that is ok, that the mental toughness of a baseball player is much stronger than any other athlete. The grind that baseball puts on a player day in and day out for a 60 game, 80 game, or 162 game season mentally is very grueling; the mental aspect of the game tears a player down more than the physical aspect of the game.

Anyways, I want to thank all of my family and friends for coming out to the games last weekend. I really appreciate all of the support and can’t thank you all enough. I hope to see a lot of fans out to Hayden Field to see our last home series of the season and help get us pn a roll to the last weekends of the year.

It’s been a holy week for my extended family; congratulations to my cousin Mitchell who became an adult member of the catholic church by receiving his Confirmation Friday night. It was a honor to be his sponsor.

schmidta1@xavier.edu as always.

-DS

The week was overall somewhat  of a success. We split 2 midweek games with UC; we won 10-4 on Tuesday at home and lost 8-5 on Wednesday evening at UC. It was great to see Coach Heilmann and get a chance to talk with him. Coach Heilmann was our pitching coach at X for the last 7 or 8 years and although he left for ‘dreadful’ university in Clifton we all still have a mutual respect and are very close with him. He is a great person, coach, and friend.

This weekend we took 2 out of 3 games from our rivals at Dayton. Friday was one of the games where it was very difficult to get a team out and I’m glad we were on the good side of that scenario. We pounded out 21 runs on 20 something hits and belted 6 home runs. If the results of Saturday’s first game would have been different, we lost 11-4, I would have said it was our break out game. Cameron Hobson for UD threw a ‘whale’ of a game and shut us down for 6 innings. We couldn’t settle in early and our defense slipped a little bit as we went down 9-0 in the first 5 innings. I’m not going to use our schedule as an excuse, but Saturday called for an early morning as we were scheduled to leave school at 8:00 am for an 11:00 am game (potentially a doublheader).

After game 1 on Saturday it was decided upon that we would play the series finale because of impending weather on Sunday. It started out the same as game 1 on Friday and we got out to an early 5-0 lead, but Dayton didn’t give in. We couldn’t quite put them away as we led by 5+ runs on a number of occassions. Pounding out 20 hits again and scoring 12 runs, we had to put out a late 3 inning rally of the Flyers and ended up winning 12-11 after getting out of a bases loaded, 0 out jam in the bottom of the 9th. Josh Murphy picked up his first career save coming in with 0 outs and bases loaded; he came in with ice in his veins and shut down the rally and we escaped with a nail-biting series victory.

This week is exam week and therefore we do not have any midweek games. Ahh it’s finally the end of school; man I wish I could say I am so disappointed, but not at all. This weekend we have Atlantic 10 leader Charlotte coming into Hayden Field on our campus. It doesn’t get any bigger than this weekend conference-wise so it will be a huge test for us. We control our own destiny to get back to the conference tournament for the 4th straight year and repeat as Atlantic 10 champions and head to the NCAA tourney for the 2nd straight year. I believe we are sitting in 6th place alone in the standings and only the top 6 teams make our conference tournament. Hope to see all of you out this weekend to support us for a game, or two, or three.

I want to say congratulations to my two cousins, Maura and Logan, for receiving their 1st Communions this weekend. That’s a big step and I can’t believe how old I am getting so fast. I can remember when both were born and it seems like just a few years ago.

schmidta1@xavier.edu as always

-DS