TeeBall on Saturdays!

There’s only one week left of Teeball: there’s a Wednesday practice, then a double header on Saturday.

Today we went to Teeball and had a great time.  Mark is really coming along, in terms of  enjoying the game, hitting the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, and understanding the game.

When he batted, I had him stand back from the base in such a way that he’d hit the ball down the third base line.  You can see he’s a bit back towards the backstop.  As you can probably tell from the green fleece he’s wearing, it was a bit chilly and even a bit rainy this morning, plus we don’t have any grass on the field–but that keeps the bugs down too.

Today, we only had four of the teammates show up for the game, so we had five people total on the Reds team.  Almost all of our experienced kids were not there. This was both good and bad, because everyone got to play in an interesting position on the field, and everyone also got to bat three times because we had three innings, and also because we didn’t really field that well, compared with when we have our experienced kids there.

Mark’s favorite thing about Teeball is running the bases at full speed. He knows where all the bases are, how he can get out, where to run, when to stop (when we tell him to) and that it’s not a terrible thing to get ‘out,’ it’s just something that happens to everyone from time to time. 

He does best if I stand right next to him and encourage him when he’s fielding and such.

Behind the backstop, there’s a huge sand pile that the little siblings like to play on when the older ones are playing ball.  I need to take some pictures of that hill.  Another thing Luke likes to do is pick flowers.  I think that’s pretty cute for a three year old.

One thing you might notice from this picture is that Luke is a ‘lefty’  He’s been that way from the beginning: always preferring his left hand over his right.  He eats left handed, throws, catches, hits, and high fives with it. 

Mark wasn’t that way.  When Mark was really young, he never showed a preference for one hand over the other. Then when he got to be about four years old.  Some kids don’t differentiate their hands until, say 3rd grade–that can be a problem, especially when they are writing.  It’s good for the brain to settle in to dedicated rolls early so further development can take place.

Looking at these pictures today reminds me that I need to buy those pictures from Steve Vick that he took earlier in the season.  I really liked the one of Mark Daniel and I at home plate where I was pointing to show him where first base was.

Looking at this last picture of Mark, one thing you might not have noticed is the out-of-focus area in the photo.  To me it has a nice quality to it and in photography lingo, that’s called Bokeh.  Bokeh is a Japanese word which has to do with the quality of the image where the image is out of focus.  For this shot, I was at 400mm on my 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6, ISO 400, f/8, 1/500.  These are great settings for stopping action and getting pretty sharp photos of a kids baseball game.  To really stop the threads on the ball and catch the dust in the air in a major league game on a double play with the runner sliding into second base, you’d need a higher shutter speed, say 1/1500 or so, I’d imagine.  but 1/500 is just fine for capturing a teeball game.