#COUGARSOCIAL

Most of my friends and my family know that I love sports and love talking about specific players (Mike Trout, my man crush), teams or sporting events. I probably spend too much time on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram looking at video highlights, reading articles and tweeting my own thoughts and opinions on different sports and other subjects. The other day I saw this opportunity posted by BYU athletics to participate with their social media during a football game and I thought this was an awesome idea. I jumped online and filled out an application. I thought I was pretty clever in answering some of the fields of the application. Who knows if I will get picked, but it would be pretty sweet sitting in the media box at Lavelle Edwards Stadium at a BYU football game and tweet, post and comment on the game live.... It is what I do on the couch during the Cougar football games anyways. 

MURRIETA MESA SUMMER BASEBALL

There was really no break for me between the regular baseball season and summer baseball at the high school. We started playing summer games before the boys got out of school for the summer. I was able to be the head coach of the varsity summer team with the help from other coaches. It was tough to organize at times with some of the boys playing football, basketball and on other travel baseball teams but we managed to have a pretty successful summer. The summer is a little bit different than the regular season. Coaches do not exchange line-ups, allowing free substitution. We usually play 9 innings instead of 7. Summer is mainly for instruction and development of the players instead of focusing on competition. The varsity team ended up 11-4 at the end of summer. As a coaching staff, we saw a lot of good things from a lot of different players. This is very encouraging since we had 13 seniors graduate from our program. It will be difficult to fill their spots but I am sure some of the young guys will fill in and take on the challenge. We saw a lot of things that need to be worked on as a program and I am excited to get back to work this fall in preparation for next season. We will be very young, but I think we will be a scrappy team that needs to rely on offense execution with solid defense. We have plenty on young pitchers that will have to be aggressive, throw a lot of strikes and trust their defense.

At the end of the summer, I had all the boys up for a BBQ and swim party. It was a lot of fun.

  

 

ANGELS BASEBALL

This is exactly how I felt after watching the Angels loose a few nights ago to the Rangers. Up by a run going into the bottom of the ninth and Frieri gave up two solo home runs to lose the game. Not only did it happen once in the series but three games in a row the Rangers won it on a walk-off home run. Unbelievable. For me, as well as many other Angels fans, the season has been a huge disappointment. Another year of high expectations with an unbelievable line-up and they are still playing below .500 baseball. Injuries have been a problem all year. Pujols was never at 100% and now on the DL. Weaver was down for a significant time with a fracture in his left arm. Our starting pitching has been okay at times but struggled going deep into games putting a lot of pressure on the bullpen. The bullpen has failed miserably. The offense and defensive side of the ball is no where close to being consistent. I believe the Angels are at the bottom of the league in defensive stats, which in the past, defense has been solid, minimizing errors. Sitting near the bottom of the American League West, 14 games back and 10 games below .500 with 56 games left, I don't see any hope for the Angels to make the playoffs at this point.  Most people believe 91 wins is the special number to win the division. The Angels would have to go 43-13 to hit 91 wins. Not going to happen. Even though they are pretty much out of it, I will still watch and cheer on my Halos, but already looking forward to next year. There needs to be a lot of changes going into next year but that conversation can wait awhile.