In summer league baseball, good team chemistry can be hard to cook up — what with the chemicals often coming from different towns and different sources of instruction, sometimes with little or no prior relationship with each other.
The Emporia A-16 Blue team, fortunately, came with good team chemistry largely built in — and don’t underestimate how important that may have been to the success the Blues have enjoyed this summer.
A good chunk of the Blues’ core — seven of the players on their roster — first played on a team together more than a decade ago, dating back to when they were Emporia Rebels. Remington Pinick, who was 6 years old that summer, uses the resulting, long-formed familiarity when he steps behind the plate for the Blues.
“As a catcher, yeah, it’s easier for me,” he said. “Because all these guys pitch, and I know when they’re wearing down. I know when I need to go talk to ’em. I know when they’re upset about something and they just need to relax.”
Starting Friday night, the old Rebels, and the rest of their teammates, will begin a quest to conquer the American Legion Class A State tournament at Soden’s Grove when the Blues take on the Wichita Sox.
With Pinick joined by the other Blues guys from that old-school Rebel team — Nate Flanagin, Matt Fry, Ethan Hall, Brian Keisler, Brett Lechien and Jacob Loucks — many of Emporia’s most important ingredients have had the time to age well and mesh well together. So what coach Jerry Cook has in his beaker stirs smoothly, and is usually combustible only when the Blues are at the plate.
“We have some pretty good chemistry, I think,” Fry said. “We know each other, how we act on the field, how we play, what we’ll do in certain situations. And it really helps, compared to guys thrown together for a summer league team. We’ve always stayed together and played as a unit.”
The way Loucks sees it, there’s been essentially equal improvement among the seven guys ever since that Rebel team first took the field.
“Those people that have been playing so long... they’ve gained credibility,” Loucks said. “You know that if you’re in a tough situation, you know if you put the ball in their hand, that they’re gonna make the play and you guys are gonna get through it. So it’s just one of those trust things. Just playing with them for so long, it really strengthens a person’s confidence, because they know they have those people behind ’em.”
Cook said the knowledge those players have about each other shows up when he coaches the Blues in games or in practice.
“It’s really nice, because they can play together and communicate on different levels, whereas a bunch of guys from different towns, it’s kind of harder to communicate,” Cook said. “Playing some juniors or sophomores or freshmen, it’s kind of hard for those younger guys to come up, communicate with those older guys and get used to their ability. Which is awesome, because (the younger guys) know what they need to do to play, how they have to bring their ability up to par if they want playing time.”
Six of the seven — all except Hall, who goes to Olpe High — will be returning Emporia High baseball players, and after an 11-10 season for the Spartans last spring, they have big things planned for the spring of 2010.
“For years, we’ve just been kind of bottom-feeders, scraping by, just getting certain wins from certain teams every year,” Fry said. “I think we really surprised people this year, got some really unexpected wins, and hopefully we can just continue that next year, until they start to expect ’em.”
From now until Tuesday, the focus is on winning a Legion State tournament. Talk to any member of the Blues, and chances are, he’ll tell you they’re capable of winning it all.
“Like Coach is always telling us, baseball is a mental game,” Loucks said. “And if you come in thinking that you’re the best team, you come out with that mindset, you can do whatever you want.”