FORT MYERS, Fla. – The highly respected and ultra-competitive EvoShield Canes organization has five teams – four based in Virginia and one in North Carolina – at this year’s Perfect Game WWBA Underclass World Championship.
At the start of play Saturday – the final day of pool-play at the five-day PG national championship tournament – four of the five Canes’ entries were either leading or tied for the lead in their respective pools – worth noting because only the 54 pool champions advance to Sunday’s playoff rounds.
Three of the EvoShield Canes’ roster’s are dominated with prospects from the class of 2016 (high school juniors) and the other two are stocked with 2017s (sophomores). On Saturday morning, one of those younger groups – the EvoShield Canes 2017 Prospects – became the first of the Canes siblings to secure one of those playoff berths.
It topped a slightly more experienced Chet Lemon’s Juice team from Tavares, Fla., 3-2 in a pool championship-deciding game at the Player Development Complex thanks to a walk-off RBI double from Cameron Reckling in the bottom of the seventh innings. Had the game ended in a 2-2 tie, the Canes 2017 Prospects would have earned the playoff berth based on tie-breaker criteria.
“It’s nice to get the win,” Canes 2017 Prospects head coach Mike Petty said after a brief victory celebration had subsided. “We never want to tie.”
Saturday was “moving day” at the PG WWBA Underclass World Championship, with 54 teams advancing to the playoffs and the other 162 playing in consolation games if they choose to.
The top-10 playoff seeds get byes into the second round with the other 44 playing first-round games; the 22 first-round winners join the top-10 in the 32-team second round with those 16 winners advancing to the third round. All of those games will be played on Sunday and the quarterfinal, semifinal and championship games are scheduled for Monday.
The EvoShield Canes 2017 Prospects pool championship sent the train in motion and its early morning matchup with the Juice certainly offered intrigue. Neither team’s pitchers had allowed a run in their first two pool-play games, with the Prospects outscoring their two foes, 14-0, and the Juice their two, 12-0.
Saturday’s game was tied 1-1 after one inning and 2-2 after three innings, leading to Reckling’s seventh-inning heroics.
“I’ve coached these guys all summer and fall and they’re fighters, man; they’ve got a lot of heart,” Petty said. “We’ve got a lot of strong players – a lot of D-I players on this team – so nothing surprises me with this team.”
The Canes 2017 Prospects are based in Fredericksburg, Va., and feature players from Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina and New Jersey, a nice representation of the Atlantic Seaboard.
They set the tone in their tournament opener Friday morning with a 1-0 win over the Rawlings Arkansas Prospects. Chris Holcomb, a 6-foot-3,170-pound 2017 left-hander from Osterville, Mass., threw a complete-game, three-hitter at the guys from Arkansas, striking out 10 and walking four.
“Coming down here I really wanted to start our team off with a lot of momentum going into the next games,” Holcomb said Saturday. “I was really focused on getting our team the right attitude going further on in the tournament and it worked out pretty well.
“I definitely think we have a lot of potential with a lot of the new kids coming in – all great athletes, great players – and it’s just worked out very well,” he continued. “There’s something about playing against the older kids that gets me all pumped up.”
In their second game Friday afternoon, the Prospects reached perfections with a pair of 2017 right-handers – Buddy Kennedy from Millville, N.J., and Toma Shigaki-Than from Oakton, Va. – combined on a four inning perfect game, striking out seven, in a 13-0 over SF Giants Scout Team 2018.
“It’s funny because we battled all year with our pitching staff,” Petty said. “Now, the last three weekends, they’ve been pitching extremely well, so I’m really excited for them. … They’re pitching really good and they’ve got a lot of guts; as a coach, I’m very proud of them.”
Petty handed the ball to 2017 lefty Ryan Kennedy from Stafford, Va., in the championship game, and he gave the Prospects four solid innings, allowing the two runs on four hits while striking out five and walking four. Logan Barker, a 2017 righty from Stafford, pitched the final three innings and picked up the win, giving up five hits and striking out two.
“I just wanted to look down and make sure that I could throw strikes and that was really the key to this game,” Kennedy said. “Once I got into a little bit of a rhythm I felt more relaxed because I knew I had good defense behind me and they would make the plays.”
The PG WWBA Under World has a way of bringing out the best in these young prospects, and often it is the best from the premier organizations like the EvoShield Canes. It was just last year, remember, that the Orlando Scorpions organization had two teams – a 2015 group and a 2016 group – play in the championship game at this event.
“Both of our 2017 groups are fantastic teams and they both have great futures,” Petty said. “We don’t look at it like one is more elite than the other; we just try to win as a program. At the 15u level we split them up and whoever does what they do is great, but our other team is fantastic, too.”
This EvoShield Canes 2017 Prospects team won three non-Perfect Game tournament championships in the 15u age group over the summer, so Petty knew coming into the PG WWBA Underclass World Championship he had a group that could hold its own.
“We came down here this weekend and I told them, ‘Look, you’re going to see some of the best teams in the country at an older age group. This is going to be the only time in your entire baseball career that you have nothing to lose but everything to gain,’” Petty said. “So I think they don’t have any weight on their back so they’re very relaxed and they’re playing really easy, and I’m just real proud of them.”
The playoffs are a totally different animal, of course, but Petty thinks this group of high school sophomores has the right animal instinct to be competitive.
“They’ve got fight and they play the game right,” he said. “These kids respect the game of baseball and they play it that way. When they make a mistake they pick their head up and they never bring it to the next play.”
So what will Petty tell them before they take the field for that first playoff game on Sunday?
“I tell them to go out there and win every single game,” he said with a laugh. “We’re here to break hearts and if we can bring home a trophy and some rings at the end of it that’s pretty awesome. So we’re going to keep on trying to win every single game, one game at a time.”