Junior College Top 50 Teams

Junior College Notebook 3/29

For the first time this season, Perfect Game’s ranking of the nation’s Top 50 Junior College teams has a new entry at No. 1.

California’s Orange Coast College (22-2-1), which began the season at No. 4 and had most recently moved to No. 2, supplanted Texas’ Howard College (20-5) at the top of the heap. With three losses since the last ranking, Howard slipped to No. 5.

Like Howard, Orange Coast boasts a number of premium Division I transfers and they have helped the Pirates dominate southern California’s rugged Orange Empire Conference, arguably one of the nation’s strongest junior-college conferences, with a 9-1 record.

The most noteworthy of OCC’s transfers are sophomore catcher/third baseman Stefan Sabol (.290-1-7) and freshman righthander Brandon Brennan (6-1, 1.43), both of whom played at Oregon in 2011. Sabol recently returned to the Pirates lineup after missing several weeks with a broken hamate bone, while Brennan has been steadily dominant with a fastball in the mid-90s. Both are candidates for the first 10 rounds of the draft in June.

Neither player, though, has been as dominant as a pair of UC Irvine transfers, sophomore righthander Keegan Yuhl (7-0, 1.27) and sophomore outfielder Chris Carlson (.439-3-32). Yuhl has a share of the state lead in wins, while Carlson ranks No. 3 in hitting and No. 2 in RBIs.

Orange Coast has also gotten significant contributions from two more outfielders, both freshman, in Boog Powell (.459-0-13), who leads the 84-team California JC ranks in hitting, and Bijan Rademacher (.297-4-31), who ranks among the state leaders in homers and RBIs.

Perennial Tennessee JC power Walters State has moved to No. 2, largely on the strength of a breakthrough season by sophomore outfielder Marcus Davis, a Louisiana State transfer. Davis is hitting .532 through 31 games with 17 doubles, eight homers and 39 RBIs.

North Carolina’s Louisburg College (33-3) and Iowa Western (21-1) were both in position to challenge Orange Coast for the top spot as they were the last undefeated teams in the country, but both teams finally lost. Louisburg had won 27 games in a row before losing its first two games of the season on the same day to South Carolina’s Florence-Darlington.

3-12 - Rankings as of March 12