A quick thought:

The spring sports season on the diamond is shaping up to be one to remember. What's most interesting to me about this season is the contrast between the county's baseball teams and the county's softball squads.

The area's softball season will be pitcher-dominated, with a number of teams being led into battle by an ace presence on the mound. On the other end of the scale will be the local baseball landscape which lost a great deal of superbad hurlers to the college ranks from last season and will be a venerable hitter's paradise –there are various elite sluggers plying their skill across the county this year and the collective OC batting average is most-likely to be unusually high when the season is complete.

Carlee Meek of Lakeland and Jordan Wheatley of Troy are two of the best softball pitchers in the state.  Don't sleep on WL Central's Krista Hakola either, she can twirl a gem with the best of them too.

The "Ruth& Gerhig" pair of OLSM Eaglets, Korey Hall of Devan Ahart, are outright studs and Pat "The Bat" Mackenzie of Brother Rice is one of the most pure hitting specimens I've seen in the last decade of watching HS ball. Also look out for my main diamond-cutting homeboys, Jake Balbas (Groves), Vinnie Booker and Aiden Murdock (Lake Orion), Sean Lau (Royal Oak), Brian Portelli and Taylor Drabek (Avondale), Jake Duzey (Athens), Mitch Kozloski (MH Lamphere) and the entire RH Adams line-up, to do some major damage at the plate this season.