New baseball team start encouragingly
Leeds University’s newest club-the Leeds Oaks Baseball Club-played their first fixtures just before the Easter break. They were playing in the first season of the British Universities Baseball Association (BUBA) Spring League, just three months after the club itself was founded.The Oaks suffered a baptism of fire with their first two fixtures, coming back to back against the Nottingham Thieves, BUBA founders and current Fall Cup champions. The gulf in class was clear to see from the start.

Whilst Nottingham have been competing for three years in Cup competitions and in national men’s leagues, the Oaks could only draw from the experience of a few weeks practice and a handful of foreign exchange students.

The pre-game excitement was very quickly extinguished as Nottingham raced into an early lead, ruthlessly exploiting some poor fielding as the Leeds pitchers struggled in blustery conditions.

Nottingham’s pitching was clearly used to the wind at their home ground; allowing them to completely shutout the Leeds batters, who failed to score over their five innings.

Despite a woeful second innings that saw the Oaks concede twenty-six runs, heads did not go down and Leeds very quickly learnt from their mistakes. Despite a 41-0 drubbing, the Oaks were confident of a much improved performance second time round.

Playing the second game straight after the first, starting pitcher Kaz “Milkman’ Honda shocked Nottingham with a fantastic display of both pace and control to shutout Nottingham’s first two innings. The Thieves eventually recovered to win the game 15-5, but the impressive learning curve of the Leeds players cannot be commended enough.

The much improved performance saw the team’s first ever run scored by a delirious Ryan Owen, and confidence was greatly boosted ready for another two games the following day against Lincoln.

With the Lincoln Commoners also playing their first competitive games, the match-up promised to be much more evenly contested. Using the valuable experience of the previous day, however, the Oaks were the team teaching the opposition all the lessons, routing Lincoln 24-3 in the first game of the day, which included Titus Singh somewhat unfairly picking out Lincoln’s only girl on the team to score an inside the park home run.

While Lincoln started the second game strongly, the Oaks recovered with some solid pitching from Singh to take the victory 26-12. The whole team performed admirably but it was Adam Carter’s experience that proved invaluable to the team over the weekend.

After two wins and with fixtures remaining against Durham and UEA, it is not inconceivable that Leeds could qualify to compete in the end of season play-offs.

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