Welcome to the Blog

With the professional baseball season in full swing and the college season finishing up, the Generals are a mere 1 month away from reporting to Petersburg, VA for what will be the Generals 10th season in the Coastal Plain League.

Our blog will contain information relating to this special 10th season, including, roster updates, games scores and story lines, CPL news, Generals in the community and we will occasionally venture into other sport stories (primarily baseball).

For those of you who stumbled across this blog and are not familiar with summer college baseball, I will try to give you some insight. Most college baseball players that have aspirations to play professional baseball have to continue playing throughout the summer, even after their college seasons come to a close. The biggest and most important difference between these summer leagues and the college ranks is the summer leagues utilize the same tools as MLB players: wood bats.

Some people, myself included, feel like the summer wood bat seasons are almost as important to a player’s career as their individual college seasons. Predicting a prospects true power is sometimes difficult if you have only seen him hit with an aluminum bat which makes it extremely important to play in a competitive summer wood bat league.

When the Generals entered the CPL in 2000 there were only a handful of good summer wood bat leagues including: the Cape Cod League (generally ranked as the best college league), the Alaska League (the Cape Cod of the West) and the Valley League in Virginia has been around for many years as well. Now you have well over 20 summer college leagues stretched all across the United States.

I have been involved with summer college wood bat baseball since 2000 and have seen many great players come through the Coastal Plain League, including, Ryan Zimmerman (Nationals) and Justin Verlander (Tigers). I have watched the leagues MLB alumni list grow each year, as these players have no doubt left an imprint in one of the 14 CPL communities.

As for the Generals we are excited about many programs initiated for the ’09 summer, including, the Home Run Reading Challenge, First Petersburg Generals Golf Tournament, added an American Legion program with 11 more home games, added Firework Friday to the schedule which will feature fireworks at every Friday home game and Generals President Larry Toombs is writing a book that will highlight the history of baseball in the Petersburg-area.

Keep checking the blog and I will try to update at least weekly but maybe more. You can email comments, thoughts, etc to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . To find out more information about the CPL visit their website at www.coastalplain.com.

College Baseball Name to Know:

Steven Strasburg – RHP – San Diego State
*most people have already heard of him as he played with team USA in the summer Olympics as the only college player….just peek at his stats and you will see why he is hands down the #1 draft pick this June….routinely throws 100

Jeremy Toombs

GM, Petersburg Generals