CARTERSVILLE, Ga. – Over the past two-plus seasons, no one in an opposing team’s lineup has been able to send Alabama State University’s somewhat undersized ace Joseph Camacho to the showers before he was good and ready to go. But Camacho wasn’t available to head coach Mervyl Melendez these past two days, done in not by an opponents’ first four hitters in the lineup but by his four worrisome wisdom teeth; he had them surgically removed back in Montgomery, Ala., Wednesday morning.
It was unfortunate timing for the 5-foot-9, 160-pound right-hander from El Paso, Texas, who was unable to accompany his teammates on the Hornets’ two-day, two-game engagement with Bowling Green University as part of the ongoing Perfect Game College Spring Swing. Dozens of teams have been involved in the Perfect Game College Spring Swing since it kicked-off in late January at PG Park South at LakePoint; the series concludes April 1.
While it’s disappointing Camacho wasn’t able to make the trip this week, as the Hornets’ regular Friday night starter it’s unlikely he would have pitched either game against BGU anyway. And despite this temporary setback, Camacho told PG over the phone on Wednesday that he fully expected to make his scheduled start Friday night against non-Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) foe Northern Kentucky on Friday night back home in Montgomery. “I’m doing great,” he said, “and I expect to pitch Friday and if not then, maybe on Saturday.”
Camacho’s absence looks to be the only real downer to the Hornets’ involvement with the PG College Spring Swing. After dropping a 7-4 decision on Tuesday, they rebounded with a decisive 11-3 victory over the Falcons on Wednesday to bump their overall 2016 season record to 7-6.
Taking part in this event serves a two-fold purpose for the Hornets in that they get the experience of playing in a PG-sanctioned event against top-notch competition while also getting the opportunity to play on synthetic turf. The latter is a plus because the SWAC Tournament in late May will be played at the Urban Youth Academy in New Orleans, which also has artificial turf fields.
“This is a great way for our guys to get used to it and have some familiarity with how the turf plays before we go to our tournament,” Melendez said. “I’m really happy that we’re here; very excited.”
This year’s ASU team is comparatively young and inexperienced – seven of its starters were not fulltime players last year – and its 7-6 record is indicative of that; the Hornets lost three one-run games and two extra-inning games before arriving at LakePoint.
It is a talented group and one that Melendez calls “battle-tested” based on their high school and travel ball experiences before they got to college, and he really likes the intensity with which they play the game. “It’s a lot of new faces and a lot of new roles,” he said. “So far I’ve enjoyed what we have done and I think that we’re building it into something good.”
The Hornets’ weekend pitching rotation is an exception to the “inexperienced” rule with senior right-hander Hunter McIntosh (Columbus, Ind.) and redshirt-junior right-hander Tyler Howe (Lakeland, Fla.) joining the senior righty Camacho. The top hitters through this season’s first 13 games are a little younger with senior outfielder Dillon Cooper (Palm Beach, Fla.), junior outfielder Carlos Ocasio (Palm Beach, Fla.), sophomore infielders Yamil Pagan and Ray Hernandez, and freshman infielder Eriq White (Snellville, Ga.).
Camacho is the key to this team having a championship-caliber season. Melendez got his first look at the smallish right-hander when he was pitching for the El Paso-based West Texas Nationals at the 2012 18u PG WWBA National Championship in Marietta, Ga. The coach liked what Camacho showed him at the event – his fastball sat 86-88 mph – and Melendez began recruiting him to ASU’s Montgomery campus despite his diminutive stature.
“He’s 5-9 but when he steps on the mound he is as big as it gets,” Melendez said. “He looks like he’s a giant on the mound with the way he approaches the game and the intensity that he exhibits on the mound, and that’s what we want to see out of a pitcher.
“You can go either way when you’re undersized,” Melendez continued. “You can go south and say that the world is against you and that you don’t have it, or you can rise to the occasion.”
The pitcher’s repertoire is also important, of course, and Camacho commands a two-seam fastball, slider and changeup that he can throw consistently for strikes. He considers the slider to be his best pitch although his changeup has been particularly effective this season, as well. After three starts, Camacho is 1-0 with a 1.21 ERA and 21 strikeouts and four walks in 21 innings of work.
“I feel like the season has been going pretty good for me and to me I feel like I’ve been doing better than (past seasons),” Camacho said. “I’ve been pitching low in the zone, throwing more strikes and getting that ‘out’ pitch a lot more than I normally do.”
His three previous seasons at Alabama State were long but very fruitful learning experiences that made him a more mature young man and a lot better pitcher. He came into the program as a freshman in 2013 thinking he had this whole pitching deal all figured out after a successful senior season at El Paso’s Franklin High School. Reality handed him a painful wakeup call – not unlike taking a 2-by-4 to the forehead – when he struggled to a 4-3 record with a 6.06 ERA as a freshman.
At the conclusion of that bewildering debut season, Melendez asked his young pitcher if he would be willing to consider throwing from a slightly lower arm slot. Camacho spent that offseason determining which the arm angle felt the most comfortable when making his delivery out of that lower slot, and he went into his sophomore year with a newfound confidence.
To call his turnaround dramatic doesn’t do justice to the night-and-day seasons he experienced his first two years in Montgomery. As a sophomore, Camacho made 13 starts, threw three complete games and finished 10-1 with a 2.31 ERA and was a First-Team All-SWAC honoree while being named the SWAC Pitcher of the Year.
Now the not-so-tall Texas was really cooking with gas. He made 13 more starts as a junior and finished 12-0 with a 3.84 ERA and again was named First-Team All-SWAC and the SWAC Pitcher of the Year. Despite the impressive numbers and back-to-back SWAC POY honors, Camacho went undrafted last June. MLB scouts and front office personnel apparently still believed his size was an issue.
“I had people telling me all the time that I was too short to be a pitcher so at first I would go out there trying to prove them wrong,” Camacho said. “Now that I’ve been (at ASU) and I’ve talked with Coach Melendez, he’s really helped me with the mental side of it and he’s always telling me not to worry about what anybody says. He’s the one that put me in that bulldog mentality to just go out there and not worry about what anybody says and just pound the strike zone.”
Camacho isn’t the first player Melendez has helped and ASU isn’t the first school at which the coach has enjoyed success. He became the third youngest coach in in NCAA Division-I history to record 500 career victories when the Hornets topped Winthrop on Feb. 26.
He won 385 of those games in 12 seasons as head coach at Bethune-Cookman and now has won 121 games in just more than four seasons at ASU. The Hornets set a school record for wins with 32 in 2013 and then squashed that mark with 37 in 2014; they were 31-19 last season.
“One of the things that was missing from the ASU program before we got here was the consistency and the winning attitude,” Melendez said. “I believe that in any organization – any program, any company – you’ve got to build from the ground up, and that’s what we did. We told the guys that we have to take baby steps before we can actually walk, and we’ve got to walk, we’ve got walk before we can we actually run, and we’ve got to run before we can actually sprint.
“We’re in the running and sprint stages where we feel good about our four years we’ve coached here – we have a good foundation – and now we have to start making the building a little bit prettier.”
During his first few years at ASU, Melendez also coached a youth team called the MBA Pride Elite on which his son Mervyl “MJ” Melendez starred while still in middle-school. Coach Melendez first spoke with PG at the 2012 13u PG BCS Finals in Fort Myers, Fla., where he was coaching the Pride Elite to the event championship with a big assist from his son MJ.
"I coach them exactly the same way," Melendez said four years ago when asked if there was any difference between how he approached 13-year-olds and his college players. "That's the benefit of being here with MBA because these kids have been together since they were 11 and they have been coached like they are big boys, like they were college players.
“I tell their parents, 'I'm not going to baby them. We're going to work with tandem relays, we're going work on bunt defense, we're going work on how to do things fundamentally right.’"
When asked what was basically the same question Wednesday afternoon, Melendez replied: “I think that helped me be a better coach. At the lower levels you can kind of experiment a little bit and you can teach the kids and you can see what works with them. And then you can take it to a higher level and you can say I was able to do this with a 10 or 11-year-old and I think it can work with (the older guys), too.”
MJ Melendez is the No. 27-ranked overall national prospect in the class of 2017 and the No. 1-ranked catching prospect. A junior at Saint James High School in Montgomery, MJ committed to his dad and Alabama State as a 13-year-old when he was playing for MBA Pride Elite and has starred for the last couple of summers and falls playing with the storied Florida-based FTB program.
“I go and practice with (my dad’s) college team every single day after school,” MJ told PG while playing for eventual champion FTB Black at the PG WWBA Underclass World Championship in Fort Myers in October. “He’s taught me everything about the game and he will continue to do that forever. Hopefully, if I ever make it to the major leagues someday, I’m sure he’ll always still be there.”
Mervyl Melendez won 11 Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC) Tournament championships in 12 years while head of the Bethune-Cookman program but is yet to win a SWAC Tournament title in four tries at Alabama State (the Hornets were runners-up in 2014).
“A lot of people look at numbers as a goal, a lot of people look at results as a goal and I look at how we play the game,” Melendez said. “If we play the game the right way, the results are going to end up coming. … I’m not the kind of (coach) who says ‘Just go out there and get it done,’ and I’m more concerned with how we’re going to get it done
“As we go into the meat of the season, let’s continue to compete and do things the right way and at the end of the year we’re going to be a better team because of it.”
The extraction of four wisdom teeth kept Joseph Camacho from making the trip to PG Park South this week but you can bet your El Paso, Texas, cowboy boots that he’s going to be there the rest of the way as the Hornets look to win their first SWAC championship and make the program’s first appearance in an NCAA Regional since the 1974 team qualified as a D-II school.
“This is my senior year and I’m not being a ‘me’ guy,” he said when asked if he had allowed himself to consider where he might stand in the pecking order at this year’s MLB Amateur Draft. “I’m for the team and I really want to get us to the (SWAC) championship. I’ve been here for four years and we’ve been close but then we end up just shy of it. That’s the only thing that’s on my mind this season.
“Nobody’s scared out there anymore, nobody’s anxious, nobody’s nervous; everybody’s out there playing their own game,” he concluded. “We’re always behind each other no matter what happens. We’re always there for each other and rooting for one another.”