Mike Rutherford has been coaching high school baseball in Maine for 30 years. And he said he’s never seen anything like this spring.

It’s been wet, raw, damp, cold – seemingly every day.

“We’ve only played three games,” said Rutherford, who coaches the 2-1 Portland High baseball team. “I’ve never gone into May just playing three games.”

Even worse, he said, is the Bulldogs only have been able to practice on the Deering Oaks baseball field once this year. “And the outfield was so wet, we couldn’t even take batting practice,” he said. “But it’s not just us, it’s everybody. We laugh about it. You can’t get mad about it.”

Early-morning rain wiped out a large portion of Thursday’s high school schedule, forcing athletic directors to reschedule more games, and baseball and softball coaches to figure out how to keep players focused. You can only get so much accomplished practicing indoors.

“We do not want to go back into the gym,” said Falmouth baseball coach Kevin Winship, whose team has played only two games (0-2) and has had only one practice on its diamond. “But (Thursday) we’ll go back inside and just hit with a skeleton crew, just the varsity starters. To go back inside … at some point in becomes counter-productive. The players don’t want to do it, the coaches don’t want to do it.”

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Tom Griffin, the veteran Scarborough High softball coach, tries to make things fun for players when they have to go inside. He’ll split the team into two squads for a Whiffle ball game, or play a trivia game in which a wrong answer results in a sprint.

“You have to try to do something fun,” said Griffin. “It’s so repetitious and boring, the girls just want to play.”

Playing in cold, damp weather isn’t ideal, either. York softball coach Kevin Giannino said the weather is compromising “the quality of the game. Watching girls play in hooded sweatshirts in less than ideal conditions makes even routine plays an adventure, particularly on wet outfield grass. It is also difficult for bench players to stay warm and make contributions later in the game. And you’re always concerned about injury and pulled muscles.”

Schedules are becoming compacted. The regular season ends May 29 and many teams are looking at playing four games some weeks to get in their full schedule of 16 games. That becomes an issue in baseball, where pitchers work with a pitch count that determines how many pitches they can throw in one day and how many days rest they need. Softball doesn’t have pitch-count restrictions.

Even those baseball teams with deep pitching staffs – such as Portland, Cheverus and South Portland – will be forced to throw someone who doesn’t have much varsity experience. “You’re going to have to pitch two junior varsity kids to get through some games,” said Portland’s Rutherford. “You could possibly be playing four days in a row, and that’s when you’re going to see a South Portland, a Cheverus, a Portland upset.”

Falmouth’s Winship said, “I think everybody is already in that boat. You just kind of pick days and say, ‘This kid is pitching here, this kid is pitching here, this kid is pitching here,’ and hope things work out. You’re going to see a lot of teams using guys on the mound they weren’t planning on using this year because of the pitch count.”

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Beyond the pitching concerns, the lack of outdoor practice time also has hurt. “We get in the gym and get our reps in,” said South Portland baseball coach Mike Owens, whose Red Riots have played three games and had one outdoor practice. “But the situational stuff that we do a lot of and what determines a lot of these wins, that’s really hard to replicate in the gym. Baserunning things, defensive situational things like bunt defense, first-and-third defense, those are just hard to replicate.”

Veteran teams will do better. They know the drills and how the coaches want the plays made. But even then, South Portland softball coach Ralph Aceto said he was “doing walk-throughs (in the gym) just to get our newer kids up to speed on what we do with our cut-offs.”

But the coaches know there’s nothing they can do about the weather, especially with the threat of rain lingering into next week.

“Up to this point it’s been frustrating,” said South Portland’s Owens. “It’s almost laughable now.”


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