Harper Sercombe
Newport is continuing its good form in the Baseball Victoria summer league women’s premier competition.
After moving up from division 2 last season, coach Dean Anglin said he is pleased with how his team has made the adjustment up to the top flight women’s baseball.
“We’re performing really, really well,” he said.
“To be competing with the teams that have been up in division 1 for the last few years is a really good position for us as a club.”
Last week, the Rams dominated Footscray 13-2 in a mid week game, which was their third win on the bounce.
“Footscray beat us last time we played them and we were the only team they’ve beaten in the last two seasons,” Anglin said.
“It was good to get a little bit of redemption and get back on the winners list against them.
“Footscray made a couple of errors on Tuesday night that were pretty costly to them and really rewarding to us in terms of the results.
“We try and keep things pretty level so not sure that we treated it differently to any other game, we did try a couple of things during that game just to mix our roster up a little bit and see how people go in different positions.
“To be honest it didn’t really work very well for us in the first innings and we went back to our standard line up from the second innings onwards and got control of the game and held it from there.”
Having had the weekend off to rest, the Rams are setting their sights on their final two matches before the Christmas break. The first being on Wednesday night against Essendon before meeting ladder leaders Springvale for the last game before the break.
“Springvale are still the best team in the competition and it’ll be a good test for us to see how we’re tracking,” Anglin said.
“It’ll be nice to see how we’re shaping up and progressing as a group and hopefully we get ourselves into a position where we can challenge them when it comes to finals.”
The Rams have been able to utilise their defensive dominance in low scoring matches throughout the start of the season. Although it seems like offensively it may have clicked as of late with the side scoring 31 of their 56 runs in the last three games.
“If you look at the runs for and against it looks like we’re a very good defensive team and not a great offensive one, I think we’ve got the lowest runs scored in the competition yet we’re sitting second,” Anglin said.
“We’ve got some pretty good pitchers which is helping us, we’re pretty lucky to have Saeko Suzuki and Shiori Hoshino.
“It’s definitely putting us in a pretty good position to challenge, I’d say primarily we are defensively and pitching ahead of scoring runs but we can score runs in bunches when we need to.
“We’re pretty solid, we’re playing pretty good baseball and I think the girls just continue to build pressure over the course of seven innings games and that’s the part that’s scoring us the runs that we need.”
