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Midget AA Beavers improve in week 2 but still winless

May 15, 2017 | 5:00 PM

Reading the boxscore does not always give you the right indication of how a game went, as is the case this past weekend when the midget AA Beavers lost four straight games and were outscored by a total of 38 runs over those games.

If you just look at the numbers, you would think week two was worse than week one for the now 0-8 Beavers, but that’s not true according to head coach Bert Benoit.

“I think the team is starting to gel a lot more. We played more as a team [this weekend],” Benoit said. “We struggled with our pitching on the weekend here…however, on Sunday, we had Brock Thompson start off our game on Sunday and he pitched 105 pitches: did an excellent job. We had a very close game with the Lumsden team on Sunday, the team that beat us quite badly the first two games on Saturday. The team is improving, that’s for sure.”

Lumsden did beat the Beavers handily on Saturday, twice, by identical scores of 14-3.

On Sunday, North Battleford was trailing just 3-2 after four innings against Lumsden. But the Cubs pulled away in the fifth with four runs and eventually won the game 9-3.

The Beavers then fell to the Moose Jaw Canucks for the third time this season on Sunday afternoon by a score of 14-4.

In terms of run production, the Beavers improved from 10 runs in their first four games to producing 13 runs in these last four.

“The guys are starting to get used to some of the curve balls that are coming in,” Benoit said. “There’s a lot of bantams that have moved up to midget so we’re a pretty young team. They’re starting to see some different piches come across the plate and they’re starting to get used to them coming and starting to hit them.”

The schedule has also not been on the Beavers side.

Not only have the first eight games of the year for North Battleford been entirely on the road, but they’ve been against top competition, which has made things tough for the young team that has only three returners from last year.

“We’re playing top teams and we go down there and we’re playing two games per day, whereas their schedule is structured differently,” Benoit said. “So when it comes putting a pitching schedule together, it’s tougher because you’re trying to save pitchers for the next day or for the third or fourth game and the other team can pitch out their pitchers and they don’t have to worry about saving them.”

Benoit said the biggest improvement for the club needs to come from the mound.

“Definitely pitching,” he said. “From a velocity standpoint as well as an accuracy standpoint. We went through quite a few pitchers on Saturday. They were just struggling.

“Our pitchers need to get stronger so that they can pitch in that range of 60, 70 pitches in a game rather than having trouble and only getting to 30, 40.”

The Beavers are finally at home this weekend, where they’ll host the Regina White Sox back-to-back at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. before they host the Weyburn Beavers the following day twice at 10 a.m. and noon.

The White Sox are 0-2-1 this season and Weyburn is 2-2.

 

nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca

@NathanKanter11