The Falcons baseball team will look to play in their first home series of the season on Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons against the Niagara Purple Eagles.
“They’re going to be a very good team,” Falcons head coach Danny Schmitz said. “They’ve been playing about .500 baseball right now, they split with Virginia, which says a lot, they’ll be very well-coached and they’ll be ready to go.”
The team is also coming off a tournament where they won three of the five games. The team feels that they have been more consistent, but there is still room for improvement.
“It’s the three phases, the pitching, defense and hitting,” Schmitz said. “In the last 10 days, maybe even the past two weeks, we’ve pretty much, on a consistent basis, gotten two of those three. The problem is, the one phase we don’t have going that day is usually just godawful. That makes it difficult because we should win ballgames if we have two of the three phases going, but the one phase that’s off that day needs to be closer to being an average that day and not well below average… We still have to learn to consistently put the three phases together, but we also have to learn that if we only have two of the three, those two have to be able to pick up the one that’s behind but the one that’s behind needs to get closer to average.”
Weather has also had an impact on how the team is preparing for the series, as they had been practicing indoors rather than outside on the field.
“Obviously we try to simulate everything we can indoors, but obviously the game’s played outdoors, so you don’t get the sun, you don’t get the wind and even though we have a nice, spacious indoor facility, it still doesn’t compare to a baseball field and the space we have out there, so we try to do as much as we can and make it as game-like as possible, so when we do get a chance to get back outdoors, hopefully we’ll be ready to go.”
The weather has also forced the team to look at alternate locations for the Friday game and could play a role for the rest of the series as well.
“There’s no way we’re going to play here on Friday so we have Mercy Field up in Toledo reserved,” Schmitz said. “Right now that’s kind of what we’re looking at, that’s a turf field there so the snow that we did get melts easier and drains better. We’re looking at (playing in Bowling Green) possibly Saturday, although that’s doubtful, but coming back Sunday to play, whether that’s one game or two games.”
Weather has already had an impact on the team’s schedule, as the originally scheduled home opener against the Findlay Oilers last Tuesday was postponed due to snow.
“You always want to play,” Schmitz said. “We can prepare all we want, but Mother Nature has the final say. She threw us a big curveball with giving us this snow. We actually could have played games in February, that’s how nice February was, but once we left for the spring trip, then Mother Nature took a turn for the worse here, so we’ve just got to ride this one out.”
