trying to get better pics at baseball games

Been taking pictures of my girlfriends son's baseball games this summer and getting some good some not so good (but thats my fault). I want to make a collage for the team when the seasons over. But the one thing i don't like doing is shoot thru the backstop. i think i have a good pic that i worked on afterwards when i got home. the 1st is the original with no pp just resized for uploading here. the second one is the finished picture, so please tell me what i did good and bad, so i can learn to do better. the shot was captured with my 50-500 sigma with a mono-pod.
Thanks for looking.

A little too saturated for me. I like to try and get a little bit of the batter/catcher in some shots like this, kinda shooting over the batters shoulder. I would also go ahead and turn the camera to portrait position, so you can frame it a little better, with out cropping.

Have you asked about shooting on the field, some leagues may let you. Of course this particular shot, will have to be shot through the backstop.

Nice clean background! I hate when I get a great shot, but an umpire or secondbaseman is in the background.

You got 500mm so use it. The posted shot is taken at 161mm and you had to crop to get to the composition in #2. It would have been lot better if you used longer focal length to just get the player to get frame filling shot.

Also I would use lower shooting angle if possible. Bump the iSO to 400 to get higher shutter speed.

like above, why are you not using your 50-500 fl??? and like above as well, a noisy picture is better than a blurry picture

watch these set of videos from Sports Shooter. and the rest if you like

http://www.sportsshoot​er.com …ting_football/i​ndex2.html

also, from your orginal shot, I would say you are too high up, possibly standing while shooting the kids, since they're kids, they're a little shorter than us adults, so you have to lower yourself,