Past behavior is supposed to be a good predictor of future behavior. So when you see that a high school baseball team finished 4-17 two years ago, and 5-16 last year, what would your record prediction be for this year?
Chances are, you’d keep it somewhere in the same ballpark. Losing teams tend to stay losing teams, especially if they’ve been losing for more than one year in a row and return much of the same core from the previous year.
Except Emporia High’s baseball team has bucked that trend in impressive fashion. After posting those two ugly records in 2007 and 2008, the Spartans have become winners. They’re entering next week’s Regional play with an 11-9 record, meaning they’ll finish 2009 as a winning club no matter what. They’ve got a couple of marquee wins in those 11, too, with a victory at Hayden and another one over Manhattan at Soden’s Grove. They even played Centennial League champion and defending State champion Seaman tough in a pair of losses in Topeka. In a spring sports season at EHS that hasn’t brought many highlights, the baseball team’s one-year turnaround — now at six wins and counting — has been a big positive.
How have coach Mike Strickland and the Spartans done it? Whether you evaluate them with your eyes or by looking at the stat sheet, the improvement just doesn’t compute. Talent-wise, the Spartans don’t blow you away, or even make you stumble. Junior pitcher/catcher/third baseman Jacob Loucks, the team’s best player, was the only guy to enter the season with postseason honors to his name after earning honorable mention All-Centennial last year. Another junior, Brett Lechien, is a fine fundamental player with good instincts on the bases and in center field. Sophomore shortstop Brian Keisler’s had a good season at the plate, and senior outfielder Zach Gifford, junior catcher Remington Pinick and senior first baseman Dominic Rodriguez have shown some ability to swing the bat, too.
But other than Loucks’ strong numbers on the mound — a 5-2 record and 2.12 ERA, with 40 strikeouts in 36 1/3 innings — the Spartans have no one with gaudy stats. Keisler has their highest batting average at .328, their highest slugging percentage at .410 and the highest full-season on-base percentage, .411. Senior second baseman Derek Nielsen has the Spartans’ only two home runs, and they’ve slugged an anemic .331 as a team. The pitching staff doesn’t have radar gun-busting flamethrowers who strike fear in opposing hitters, and Loucks is the only guy with double-digit innings pitched whose ERA is under 3.71.
So, again — how?
Talk to Strickland and his team, and they’ll tell you that leadership — including the leadership coming from the group of nine Spartan seniors — has been the biggest key in turning this into a winning club.
“We wanted to win, and we put in our time,” said Rodriguez, one of those seniors. “Blood, sweat, tears and everything.”
Senior leadership hasn’t been the only major factor, though — after all, several of the Spartans’ best players are juniors, and their best hitter is a sophomore.
Emporia is scrappy and opportunistic, and a closer look at the stats reflects some of the tools they use to win. They’ve drawn a solid 73 walks as a team, helping them to overcome a .260 team average by posting a .352 on-base percentage. They’ve stolen bases with a high rate of success, taking 53 in 59 attempts.
A little luck might be a factor, too, but EHS creates some of its own luck. The Spartans fight to hang around against teams that, on paper, should pummel them, and when the opponent gives them a gift, they’ll take it. And, as Strickland notes, their pitching has done enough recently to keep them in games.
The Spartans are modest about their turnaround, and Loucks doesn’t see it as anything remarkable.
“Because we’ve had the team this year to come out and get a winning record,” he said. “You look at our season, we should have a higher record than that, because we’ve let a couple close ones slip away. But it’s not really remarkable, because we’ve had the teams in the past few years to get winning records. We just haven’t had the leadership and the focus those couple years to do it.”
Strickland deserves plenty of credit, too. He’s never satisfied with what his team has done, and he’s not about to start by being satisfied with merely winning more games than he loses.
“In this program, we should be there every year,” Strickland said. “It’s great with what our kids have done, and it’s a (testament) to what they’ve done day in and day out here at practice. They continue to work hard, and we’re not going in there settling, that we’re gonna be 11-10. We’re going in there to win Regionals, like we planned from Day One.”
His team has fed off that attitude.
“He’s happy when we win and we do things good,” Loucks said. “But you want that in a coach. You want somebody that’s gonna keep you going, one that pushes you, wants you to strive for more. And that’s what we’ve got in him, and that helps us going, (helps) us keep our focus, our mentality during the game.”
So when the Spartans officially learn their Regional draw — they were scheduled to do so at a seeding meeting this morning — they’ll be shooting for more. They set a preseason goal to win 13 games, and doing that would get them to the State tournament.
“I think teams will take us serious when we get up there,” Rodriguez said. “We’ll show ’em how we play.”