With that, Mill Creek’s season
was officially over. Although it had seemed inevitable, baseball coaches around
the state had hoped students could return to school and seasons be completed. Now that won’t happen. Despite playing only
one home game, ironically the last game the Hawks played, Mill Creek finished
with a 14-1 record. They ended up number one in the Max Preps Georgia Rankings
and No. 4 in the National Rankings.
Could the Hawks have won the
state championship? “I don’t know,” said
Jones, “I knew we had a solid ballclub. The question mark always comes down to,
‘Do you have the arms?’ ” One of those
arms is/was left-hander Zach Green who has signed with Louisiana Tech.
Green was hanging out with Beau
when Coach Jones got home from the field.
They were watching the classic pitching match-up between John Smoltz and
Jack Morris in Game Seven of the 1991 World Series on MLB Network. Neither were even born when the Twins beat
the Braves 1-0 in 10 innings to win the World Championship that year.
“It was probably the weirdest experience,”
said Coach Jones. “I just wanted to run
up and hug him but right now that’s not appropriate. My heart hurts for him and all the other
guys.” Coach Jones was going to spend
Thursday calling each one of his players on the phone.
Up the road in Athens, that
reality had touched home much earlier with the cancellation of the college
baseball season. “It’s just surreal,”
said Georgia Bulldogs Coach Scott Stricklin.
“It hits me about once every hour.
I just can’t believe this is happening.
I thought we had a chance to do something special this season.”
He thought that for good reason. The Bulldogs’ season ended on the eve of their
SEC opener with the team getting ready to take on the No. 1 ranked Florida
Gators. Georgia was right behind them in
the Top 25, ranked second in the nation with a 14-4 record.
With two projected first round
draft picks in the starting rotation in junior righthander Emerson Hancock and
sophomore righthander Cole Wilcox, the Dawgs had a great shot at returning to
the College World Series for the first time since 2008. Maybe they’d have won their
second national championship and first since 1990.
Now like everybody else, Coach
Stricklin is “shrugging his shoulders because there’s still a lot of questions
to be answered.” Questions like roster
management. As Stricklin pointed out,
college baseball teams are going to have “overflooded rosters” next season.
That’s a result of the NCAA’s
decision to grant all spring athletes an extra year of eligibility due to the
season lost to the coronavirus shutdown.
Now senior players have the option of returning next season. Many junior players who would have been selected
in the MLB Draft, won’t now that the draft has been reduced from 40 rounds to
five. Then there are all the incoming
freshmen who signed in the 2020 recruiting classes.
Coach Stricklin believes the NCAA
did “right by the student athletes (who played only a third of the season.) But
anytime you fix one problem, you create others.
It’s tough. It’s going to affect
everybody.”
And make tough decisions, even
tougher. That’s the story for North
Gwinnett star and Bulldogs’ 2020 signee Corey Collins. He’s one of the top high school catchers in
the nation and will likely be a very high pick in the MLB Draft, which has been
pushed back from June until July. The
wait will be excruciatingly long for most players.
“It’s hard,” said Collins, “and
if people tell you that it’s not, they’re lying to you. But everybody is in the same boat. It might make a difference for some people,
including me. But whether I go pro or go
to college, I will have to work my butt off.
Fight for my spot every day.”
Strangely enough from a recruiting standpoint, it appears the high
school players whose futures are being impacted the most are the junior classes. While most
high school senior players have their future destinations determined, this is
the season recruiting really ramps up for juniors. “There’s uncertainty. There’s kids with high aspirations, trying to
make a name for themselves,” said Coach Jones.
Like everybody else in the country,
players and coaches are hoping that as a nation “we can flatten the curve.” It’s
a term that has become a part of our everyday language but ironically has
nothing to do with baseball. Epidemiologists
use the term to describe plans of slowing the rate of viral infection. Perhaps if successful we all could return to
some semblance of normal by Memorial Day.
If that were the case, “the
summer season would be huge, because the high school season got crushed. The Fall season would be massively important
as well.” Those are the words of Jeff
Auterson, Director of Instruction for Auterson Baseball. He’s a former high school baseball star
himself who played six seasons in the Dodgers minor league system.
Auterson Baseball provides individual
and group instruction for young ballplayers and fields 18 teams, ages 8-18 in
its Georgia Jackets travel baseball program.
All group instruction and travel ball had ceased several weeks ago with
social distancing mandates but individual instruction had continued until late
this week. That came to an abrupt end with Gov. Kemp’s shelter in place order
for the entire state. “The fear has been
a crippler” for Auterson’s business.
Auterson is optimistic there will
be travel ball this summer, believing the season could be expanded with
tournaments stretching into July if they get the all-clear to play. If that happens, it will be a tremendous reprieve
for high school juniors who are now dealing with a “short window for schools”
to evaluate them.
In the meantime, players have to make
do. Collins knows a friend who has a
batting cage in his basement. Former
major league pitcher Ryan Vogelsong lets Collins throw “in his big front yard.” Collins and his buddies might get together for
a whiffle ball game but as the high school senior points out, “you can’t go to
the park without being arrested.”
For Coach Jones there’s no need
to tend to the field for now, he’ll tend to his players the best he can while
maintaining social distance. “Our job as
high school coaches is to help guide, be a sounding board, be a counselor. I tell my players all the time…listen to me…chew
on what I have to say…swallow it or spit it out.”
The 2020 season has been a tough
one to swallow.
No comments:
Post a Comment