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Kellen Raab

Kellen Raab is a 23 year old pitcher in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization. In 2004, Kellen's first season of professional baseball, he posted a 3-3 record with a 4.38 ERA while striking out 56 batters in 62 innings for the Yakima Bears of the Northwest League.

Journal Entry 4-27-2005

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The season is now in full swing and we hit our first snag as a team. After starting out 6-2, we have gone 4-7 since, which still puts us one game over .500.

It's still really tough to handle. Since I started high school I have only played for one winning team, that was my senior year when we set the school record for wins but lost first round of our districts. I really want to play for a winner so I get a little upset when we aren't playing up to our capabilities.

In the past week we played the Fort Wayne Wizards and the Kane County Cougars. Both teams were under .500 when we played them but Ft. Wayne won the series against us and we split with Kane County.

Fort Wayne was not an impressive team to me. I think we could have beaten them in every game we just beat ourselves.

The wizards had the number one pick from last year, Matt Bush. I was not impressed by the young player, though he did hit his first professional homerun. That was the only hard hit ball he had in the series.

At short he had 3 errors in the first game, and struggled a few times the next few games. I was very impressed though by his arm; which is why I think if he doesn't pick it up at the plate in the next three years, he will be moved to the mound.

I pitched on Friday and was hosed by the hometown scorers, who gave a hit on what was an apparent error by our left fielder which lead to an inning that was extended, and I gave up two runs.

I settled down the rest of the night and didn't give up anymore runs and doubled my strikeout total for the year with 6 K's. The best one was against Bush. I challenged him with three straight fastballs over the plate and he didn't touch one of them.

Our next series was at Kane County where we beat ourselves again and let a couple games slip away because of poor defense.

We had strong outings from A.J. Shappi and Steve Jackson. Also in this series we saw some good offense from our current team leader Augie Murillo, and a 6 RBI in one inning performance from Mark Reynolds.

The Cougars had just one prospect on their team, Javier Herrera. Herrera was just coming off of his steroid suspension so he started off slow but picked it up over the length of the series.

Its nice to be home again though for an 8 game home stand against the top two team from the other division, Wisconsin and Clinton.

I am going to keep this week short and write again after the weekend to update on the series' and my pitching performances.

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