IT’S GOING TO BE A LONG WEEK
A’s preparing for four straight days of baseball
AMSTERDAM, NY » For the first time in their ICBL season, the Albany Athletics will play baseball four days this week.
The seven games they will play include three doubleheaders, along with the single game they played against the Amsterdam Mohawks on Monday night.
“We’ve been talking about this starting last week, about how important this week was. This is going to be a demanding week,” said Athletics manager Joe Altieri.
“We have to really have pitching performances that are efficient, quality and keep our guys healthy.”
Monday was initially supposed to feature the first nine inning game of the summer season, so when the game was called after playing an unnecessary bottom half of the seventh inning, that came as a surprise to many in the crowd.
“We were supposed to. I got the phone call at 4:00 that they were short on pitching and we all have a lot of double headers coming down the pipe, so we just went one seven inning game,” said Mohawk’s manager Greg Christudulu.
“We have a bunch of games bunched together this week and so do they. This summer
is flying by real fast, unfortunately.”
While the A’s were able to escape with the 3-2 win against the Mohawks on Monday night, they were out one of their most consistent players, Chris Salamida. The former Valleycat, who acts as a starter, closer and solid bat in the lineup had a work conflict and the A’s needed someone else to step up.
That happened to be Joe Gratton.
“He got a really good changeup. He’s got three pitches, a fastball, curve and change, but the changeup is really his specialty,” Altieri said of Gratton, who closed out the game with two innings of strong relief.
“He really takes something off it. He has the same arm slot, same motion, same everything and it’s really hard to pick up and he had it working today. He’s a bulldog.”
Altieri continued, talking about what his team has to do this week to be successful, not only in the win column, but to stay healthy while having to play so many games.
“We have to play very good baseball and it starts with pitching and we have to cut down on strikeouts at the plate,” he said.
“We don’t want guys out there in the heat all week who are hurting, but are just pushing to help get us through. I don’t want any of our guys to be in that position.”
The A’s manager has been reinforcing some of the lessons ballplayers are supposed to learn in Little League, but sometimes can be easy to forget.
“Today I talked to the guys about hydration. It’s so important, especially for staying healthy,” he said after Monday’s win against the Mohawks, which started out as a 95+ degree day.
“We’re going to be out in the heat for seven games this week and they can’t come to the park sick and we don’t want anyone to get sick because of bad nutrition. You’re simply just not going to play well if you’re not hydrated either.”