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Westside Thunder play first games of 2019 baseball season

October 1, 2019   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

The Westside Secondary School Thunder baseball team are doing well after their first two games despite coming up short in both outings.

The Thunder are playing varsity ball with no senior members on the team this year.

They lost their first game to Centennial Collegiate on Monday, September 16.

Back on the diamond two days later, the Thunder hosted Our Lady of Lourdes at Princess of Wales Park.

The Thunder are a young varsity team this season with mostly grade nine and ten players on the squad.

Senior players from last year graduated and with no grade 11 players on the team last year, there were no players to move up and play at the grade 12 level.

In spite of that team had a good effort on the diamond again OLOL.

Wednesday’s game saw the OLOL team leading 3 – 1 in the fourth inning, then go ahead 4 – 1 on a triple that was hit to the right field fence.

Westside had a good fifth inning putting players on first and third, but they couldn’t finish and the side retired.

Westside had one final chance to even things up in the seventh inning.

They scored after an errant throw to second base to close the gap, but they couldn’t tie things up and had to settle for a 4 – 2  loss.

“We got destroyed on Monday,” said Westside catcher Justin Howes. “I think it was a lot better game today. We had more hits. We pitched a lot better today. The last game we were walking a lot guys because it was raining.”

Westside pitcher, Markus De Sousa, echoed the fact that Monday’s game was hampered by the rain.

“We couldn’t get a handle on the ball,” he said of the effect the rain had on the play. “Today was a perfect day for baseball. Today was fun. I like playing defence, so I kept firing at the glove. I felt it was a good game for me.”

The team has a lot of younger, but experienced players this season.

“We don’t have any grade twelves,” Markus said. “We have three grade elevens, and they weren’t hear today. Most of the team are grade nine and ten players. The grade twelves from last year all graduated.”

The Thunder have six more games on the regular season schedule – all of which will be played in Guelph prior to the playoffs.

The team was slated to play a double header on September 25, against J.F. Ross and Guelph Collegiate.

Orangeville Sportchek and players and families enjoyed steak fajitas with all the trimmings by local chef and part-time tennis instructor Michael Soden

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