We begin our second series of games in Texas in 2006 today. We are playing in the first Whataburger College Classic in Corpus Christi against three other strong teams. We will play Texas A&M-Corpus Christi today, Rice on Saturday and TCU on Sunday. After this weekend, we head over to Austin to play against Texas on Tuesday.

It's going to be a fun week of baseball.
 

Last night, we pulled into Corpus Christi and headed over to Whataburger Field to practice. The field is awesome! It's used for the Astros' AA baseball team. The field is real nice, and the stadium holds a lot of people. Behind the right-field wall, there is a bridge that crosses over the ocean, and in left, there's a huge scoreboard in front of some old warehouse style building. It is a pretty neat place to play.
 

After practice, there was a home run derby. Colin Curtis and Frank Mesa were the two participants from our team. Colin hit two home runs in the first round, and Frank hit one. They advanced to the final round, but didn't hit anymore home runs. A player from TCU won the derby with five home runs. It was fun cheering on and joking around with Colin and Frank during the derby. It didn't matter about losing the derby, because we are focused on getting some team wins this week.
 

Our team is playing well lately, coming off three wins against Auburn last weekend.

One of our talented two-way freshmen, Ike Davis, was named the National Player of the Week. He not only pitched well against Texas Tech on Tuesday, but also hit two grand slams last week. Ike is pretty talented, and it's great to have a freshman like him step up and help the team out. We have had plenty of big contributions from freshmen and other first-year players. All of these guys have been a huge reason for why our team is playing well right now. It takes a lot of pressure off of guys on a team when you can look around and know that every player on the team is talented and capable of doing great things. This is the feeling our team has right now.

We're about to head to the ballpark to kick off the Classic.  See you next week back in Tempe!

Joe Pa

(photo courtesy of Arizona State Media Relations Office)