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The season progressed from there as baseball seasons tend to pass, constant series of travel days, a game almost every afternoon as our team -- such as it was -- made the best of a rough situation. Clearly we’re not as good as we looked early in the season, and even as I continued to show improvements on the field, we lost a lot more games than we won. From mid-May through the end of June I started ten more games, and during that stretch our manager started using me more for longer stretches, counting on me to be able to stay in games and make the best of whatever situation I found myself in.
Seven of those games saw me pitching at least seven innings, and twice I completed games on the road, going the full eight innings ... though we lost both of those. I’m still allowing a lot of hits, but I’ve been controlling the ball’s movement better and have been walking fewer batters on average, so I feel confident on a daily basis that I can keep from giving up too many runs ... and it’s shown well in my stats. Through sixteen starts I’ve got a 3.47 ERA and I’ve thrown 109 innings of work, and I’m starting to feel better about my abilities, though I clearly have a long way to go to get to the big leagues.
We’re 30-46 heading into the month of July, which has us just three and a half games out of last place and 16 games out of first, so unless something changes and our whole team suddenly becomes incredible, it’s looking like we won’t be making a return trip to the Texas League championship series. The biggest issue is we’re simply not putting up enough runs, as the worst team in the league for offensive production. So I and our other pitchers will have our work cut out for us to try to pitch our way to wins when the bats aren’t supportive. With a couple weeks left before the midseason break, and three months left in the season, almost anything can happen, so we’ve just got to keep our heads up and remember we’re getting paid to play this game. How crazy is that?
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