Menu
BENNETT'S MINUTES: Putnam County baseball fighting tough battles
After rough start to season, Putnam County teams show promise
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a three-part series of columns examining baseball in Putnam County. The second part will run on Tuesday, including comments and observations from coaches and parents, and the final part will run on Wednesday, describing efforts being made to help teams for the future.
———
Five Western Indiana Conference baseball teams battled on Monday for sectional championships.
West Vigo and Indian Creek escaped with titles in Class 3A, as the Vikings surprisingly routed Sullivan 11-0 in the finals at Owen Valley. After an easy 17-1 win over Broad Ripple in the Bishop Chatard Sectional semifinals, Indian Creek beat the host team 2-1 in the championship game.
Northview competed in Class 4A for the first time, losing 13-12 to Terre Haute South in the championship game at Avon. Indiana signee and potential Major League Baseball draftee Braydon Tucker did all he could for the Knights, striking out 20 batters in a 1-0, nine-inning win over Plainfield in the quarterfinals and then beating Brownsburg 3-2 in the semifinals on Monday.
Tucker was unable to pitch in the final game, though, and the Braves emerged the winners of the slugfest.
Cascade defeated the hosts 7-2 at Speedway, then beat Indianapolis Shortridge 19-4 in the semifinals. Covenant Christian scored six runs in the top of the ninth inning to beat the Cadets 14-8 in the finals.
Other opponents of Putnam County teams who won sectionals in addition to Covenant Christian were North Montgomery (at Crawfordsville), Tri-West (at Danville) and South Vermillion (beating Monrovia 8-6 in finals at North Putnam).
That’s a lot of good baseball teams, something people in West Central Indiana already knew was the case.
Missing from that list of sectional finalists are the four Putnam County schools, who are fighting uphill battles of all sorts in their quests for baseball success. After a rough start to the season this spring, with each team suffering more than its share of losses by the 10-run rule, the end of the season provided a lot of moments that show all the work being done will start providing better results in the future.
To examine the issue of competitiveness in high school baseball, I reached out to all of the varsity coaches, some assistant coaches and some parents of players both current and past. They all didn’t respond, but enough of them did to give me a decent idea of what does — or doesn’t — happen since my history with Putnam County is mostly from afar except for the past 26 months.
I have never really done this before, but I granted anonymity to the people who voiced their opinions. I have tried my best to disguise their school affiliations, but honestly none of them said anything that could be construed as harshly negative.
So, issue by issue, here is a look at Putnam County baseball and the issues it faces:
Common factors
High school baseball overall just isn’t as good as it was back in “the day.” Even at the big schools.
We all know the accused culprits — the short attention span of kids today, the technology that has consumed their lives and keeps them from practicing as much as their fathers did, the lack of connection between kids and Major League Baseball (such as World Series games starting at 8:30 p.m. on school nights) and the complete oversaturation of the summer months with off-season workouts/contests for all of the other sports.
Those factors are all guilty as charged, and if I were to put them on trial my first witness would be the movie “The Sandlot.” In my recent binge of catching up on movies I had never seen, I watched this jewel for the first time. If you haven’t seen it, it’s one of those movies not really “about” anything in particular, but just one that chronicles a group of kids who meet at a vacant lot and play baseball. There are various subplots involving a vicious dog in a nearby junkyard, a rival team that becomes the enemy and a father-son conflict — but it’s mainly about kids playing baseball. No umpires, no parents, no structure. Just kids playing.
I wonder if any kids today who watch that movie can relate to it in any way. I couldn’t tell you what decade it was the last time I saw kids playing informally, even in whiffle ball. We can thank smartphones, Xboxes and Netflix for that.
We used to go to a big field in Terre Haute behind what is now Kroger (formerly a Kmart), take our lawnmower, cut the infield, stack shopping carts and palettes for a backstop and played all day. Enforcing the rules, and sometimes even making them up. (Were we the only ones to “close” right field to batted balls if we didn’t have enough fielders, or use “ghost runners” if we were low in bodies because too many people had to go home?)
We learned a lot from our dads and taught ourselves the rest through repetition. As a result, players were more experienced and more skilled. Not me, but the good athletes were. Our high school teams didn’t even need coaches. I swear we could have put our best players on a bus in mid-winter, traveled to Florida and successfully played their teams.
It’s just not that way any more, and the amount of time needed to properly develop those skills isn’t there for high school coaches. More on that later.
The timing of high school baseball is also bad. The weather, especially this year, is normally cold and rainy. The exponential increase over the years in the amount of high school students going unsupervised to spring break in Florida has been astounding. Back in “the day,” coaches could tell players they could not go on a spring break trip if they wanted to be on the baseball team. If they did that now, many schools would not be able to field a team — because a lot of kids would pick spring break.
Indoor baseball has minimal value, but it’s not the real thing. The first year I coached junior varsity baseball at North Vermillion, all the guys would work on their swings through the normal methods of hitting off the tee, “soft toss” and also hitting plastic golf balls with whiffle ball bats.
We spent the most time on the pitching machines, though. Our guys killed the pitching machines, to the point where I told some of my friends we would have the best hitting varsity team around. To my surprise, I think we got shut out in our first three games; the pitching machine couldn’t throw curveballs.
Some athletes I have talked to say they don’t play any spring sports because they have worked all summer, played a fall sport and then a winter sport, and they need some sort of a break before the off-season circus begins again.
That sentiment is understandable, but doesn’t help the pool of athletes available for the spring sports. And at small schools, the number of potential players can’t afford to be diminished by anything.
Lack of recent success
The schools mentioned above are fortunate that they are deep in baseball tradition, and at their schools playing baseball is still a big deal. Maybe not as much as in the past, but still a bigger deal than at most schools.
And places like Shakamak which don’t offer football look to baseball as their “go-to” sport. (Yes, Shakamak won its fifth straight sectional this year to give the Lakers 24 in the past 47 years.)
Our Putnam County teams don’t have the luxury of leaning on such traditions.
Cloverdale has won four sectionals in its history — 1969, 1981, 1983 and 1984. (If you recognize some of those years as prime basketball years, also, it’s no coincidence.) But none in 34 years.
Greencastle has won 12 sectionals, but none in the past 24 years. The Tiger Cubs won in 1967-68, 1970, 1972-74, 1976-77, 1985, 1989, 1991 and 1994.
North Putnam has won four titles, coming out on top in 1978, 1999, 2000 and 2007. The Cougars should have won one two years ago, losing in the championship game to a formerly Class A Rockville team only in the field after moving up to 2A due to the IHSAA success factor.
South Putnam has won the most recent sectional title among county teams, claiming crowns in both 2009 and 2010. The Eagles had previously won sectionals in 1987 and 2006.
Extending an existing tradition is really hard. Starting one is even tougher.
Success breeds success, the common phrase goes. Unfortunately, sometimes the inverse is true.