NOTEBOOK Scrappers vs. Williamsport

Fryman’s pluses: The venues are the same and the organization is usually intact. But as far as the personnel, that changes almost totally from one season to the next. Now 30-plus games into the season, Scrappers manager Travis Fryman and coaches Ken Rowe and Anthony Medrano have had a good chance to watch and evaluate some of the young players in the Cleveland Indians organization. Here is what Fryman has seen thus far that he likes: “Most of the guys carry an upper cut swing when they get here. You can get away with that using an aluminum bat, but with the pitching much better here [than in college] and using the wood, it doesn’t work. We struggled earlier in the season, but in four of our last six games, we have had our best offensive output and that is encouraging to see. From the fundamental standpoint, we are making improvements in getting the grasp of what we run in the Indians organization. Our communications is much better in making our relays and hitting the cutoff man and our starting pitching has been steadily improving and that is encouraging to see.”

Minuses thus far: “We still struggle with consistency out of our bullpen and our infield play has been very inconsistent,” continued Fryman. “We started the season OK, but we have hit some rough stretches along the way. Offensively, runs have been hard to come by earlier in the season, but we have seen some improvement in that area of late and we hope that trend continues. Of course, we would have liked to have won a few more games to this point in the season, but overall, I am more encouraged than I am discouraged. Our baserunning has been tremendous all year. We had one real bad game and it seemed as though we packed most of our mistakes into that one game. Even our coordinators said that for a young team, our aggressiveness on the bases, reading balls in the dirt, going from first to third plus not getting doubled off on line drives have been some of the best areas in the organization this season. Then after getting that good news, we go out and in one game and make the huge baserunning mistakes that cost us a ball game.”

Finally: When Corteze Armstrong smacked a sharp ground single to right field in the third inning of Saturday night’s 3-0 loss to the Crosscutters, it was just a little more than a base hit for the Scrappers outfielder. Going into the game, Armstrong was struggling through an 0-for-27 stretch that spanned his last 10 games. His average entering Sunday’s game was still just .145.

Bill Albright