Springing in to baseball season...

Friday was the first day of Spring and the first day I finally got to shoot some high school baseball. And not only was it just a baseball game, I got to shoot one of the best pitchers in the country. I'm a huge baseball fan and love to watch a good game even without my camera. So, when I get to shoot one of the top prospects in the country, well that's just a bonus!

Brownwood High School pitcher Shelby Miller is rated the 9th best pitcher in the country and has a bunch of radar gun toting scouts following him around. The kid has a 97 mph fastball, and coupled that with a nasty 12-6 curveball that should be outlawed in high school baseball, because no one can hit that ball when he's on. This was going to be a game I wasn't going to miss. At the start of the game the kid was just unhittable. I didn't have a whole lot of time at the start of the game because I had to shoot a portrait of a pair of soccer players on the other side of the school campus 30 minutes after the game started. I concentrated on shooting the Miller since there wasn't much of any hitting going on. I was shooting for both the game story as well as a feature about Miller.

So, for the first two innings I spent shooting Miller. I also grabbed a shot of all the scouts with their radar guns, I think there was eight there. After I got back from my portrait I needed to concentrate on the game (high school games are only 7 innings) it was the start of the sixth inning and the score was 1-0 Brownwood. Miller was losing some of his velocity and both teams were starting to hit. The sixth inning was rather uneventful. Luckily in the seventh inning there was some hitting and some decent photos to be made. I was beginning to sweat there until a Brownwood player hit a fly ball to right field and I was able to be attentive enough to get it as he was diving for it. He missed it and allowed what would eventually be the winning run.