After an opening weekend rainout to start the month of March, the SoCal ASA got their season started Saturday under sunny skies at De Muth Park in Palm Springs. The league has been revamped substantially, with a half dozen of the top “C” teams from 2005 bumped up to the “A/B” division.

Click here for Saturday’s Scoreboard from the Round Robin portion of the tournament.

With most of the pre-season talk focused on veteran ballplayers being added to roster or moving from one team to the other, it was youth that was served on Saturday, as the Young Bucks went 3-1 and grabbed the top seed and first round bye for Sunday’s single elimination bracket. Of course, it didn’t hurt the talented Santa Barbara squad to have a veteran Buck on the mound, in the form of manager Clyde Bennett’s son Mark Bennett, who pitched in 3 of the Bucks 4 games, enroute to a 3-1 record Saturday. The Santa Barbara Young Bucks, whch finished 2nd in last year’s 23 and under Nationals, was the only team to notch 3 wins in 4 round robin games Saturday. The Young Bucks top seed earned them a first round bye while the other 6 teams slug it out Sunday morning in single elimination bracket play.

Mark Bennett would be the first to concede that, having passed his 40th birthday, he no longer qualifies as a “young” buck. But with their regular ace, Anthony Martinez pitching for his regular season team, the Amigos, the Young Bucks were happy to have the dominant veteran starter in the circle. Mark is a member of the 2006 ISC level CR/Portland team, expected to play in Kitchener, Ontario Canada in August. He is no stranger to ISC World Tournament competition, having been the mainstay for the Santa Barbara Bucks, at a number of world tournaments, and was the face of the team to many So Cal fans. At 6’8″, he casts an imposing figure on the diamond, and showed Saturday that he can still dominate a game.

The Young Bucks dropped their nightcap (and starting at 11:30pm, I do mean nightcap), a 6-5 thriller to San Diego Primetime, in which the “kids” rallied to tie the game at 5 before Primetime scored the game winner in the 7th.

(more…)

From the SoCal ASA website: League Weekend in Palm Springs

PALM SPRING TOURNAMENTS
The tournament for this weekend is set with 17 teams playing in two classifications. Both classifications have the regular teams and it looks like there will be plenty of great games to watch. Teams will begin playing the round robin at 9:00AM on Saturday with the B Classification getting 4 games in the round robin. Sunday’s single elimination will start at 8:00AM. To view the schedules and for directions, press the links below:

Click link above for all the details, and see especially important notice about directions to DeMuth Park, which indicates that you cannot enter via Gene Autry Trail, as in the past, due to construction. See link below for Satellite Google Map. Gene Autry Trail is to the right (east) of the red pin. while El Cielo is to the left (west) of the red pin. The diamonds are visible in the satellite photo — to the left of the red pin that marks 4375 Mesquite. The diamonds at the far left (closer to El Cielo) are diamonds 7&8, the ones closer to the red pin are diamonds 5&6.

Click here for Google Map to DeMuth Park. You can zoom in on fields by clicking up on the grid-bar on the left side of the map, or drag the map with your mouse.

For those of you without Adobe Reader, click here for the Class B Round Robin schedule.and here for the Class C Round Robin schedule