Mistakes, misplays plaguing Royals

Consistency is always an issue with a young team, and being consistently inconsistent is exactly what the young Armena Royals have produced up to the midway point of the season.

The Royals dropped a 16-4 decision in a mediocre effort that saw them make six errors enroute to their worst loss of the 2009 campaign at the hands of Leduc on Tuesday night. This after drilling Tofield and upsetting Ryley in convincing fashion a week before.

“Respect is something you have to earn, especially after last season,” said third baseman Jason Buzzell. “We’ve earned a little bit back with Camrose, and obviously Tofield and Ryley, but we have to put in a better effort against Leduc.

They still think we’re a joke, and rightly so.”

The Royals battled hard for five innings before crumbling in the final two frames. Down just 6-3 in the fourth, Mark Walker got what seemed at the time to be a huge 1-6-3 double play to end the inning. But the Royals bats couldn’t cash anything in for the next two innings, and the comeback was thwarted. 

Player-coach Clark Banack indirectly called out veteran Jason Buzzell, known for his first-pitch flails, and several others, following the game for their impatience at the plate.

“After that first inning there’s no way we should have been swinging at first pitches against that guy,” Banack scathed. “We were patient in the second and we scored a few runs, then we got away from that for the rest of the game.”

Besides the offence, errors, too, have plagued the young Royals. With the exception of the game against Ryley, Armena has made at least four errors per game, many of them leading to innings with four or five runs given up. They have to cut down on those, or they will surely miss the postseason yet again.

However, the team needs to put that all behind them for the biggest four-game stretch of the season. Thursday night they host Bardo before going on a Beaver County swing of three games over the next two weeks – back-to-back road tilts with Ryley before heading to Tofield on June 23.

“We’ll need to find a way to combine effort and execution,” Buzzell said. “So far it’s been fleeting and flickering, and that generally doesn’t equate to wins.”

Posted on June 10, 2009 by Jason Buzzell