GLENDALE, Ariz. – The 2020s, with a nice mix of 2019s and even a few 2021s, swarmed the playing fields here at the Camelback Ranch spring training complex and not far away at the Goodyear (Ariz.) Ballpark spring training complex Friday as the 14u Perfect Game WWBA West Memorial Day Classic enjoyed its first day of play in the sun-kissed West Valley.
Twenty-eight teams, most from Arizona and California with two from Nevada and one from Colorado, are vying for the tournament title this Memorial Day weekend. Last year’s four podium finishers – BPA, SY Titans and Phenom Signature from California and Arizona’s Sandlot Baseball AZ – are not among them. PG’s 14u events annually offer a fresh influx of young prospects, many from upstart organizations, getting their first exposure in front of PG scouts while experiencing a bold new world of elite tournament play for the first time.
“This event is different for them in terms of the setup and everything, the fact that they’re playing teams they don’t typically play and the fact that it’s a wood bat tournament – the combination of the new pieces of the tournament excites them,” Phenom AZ 14u head coach Aaron Schooler said Friday afternoon before his team opened pool-play against the West Coast Braves Red on the Dodgers’ side of the Camelback complex.
“We’ve spent the last month-and-a-half strictly using wood (bats) just to prepare (the players) for it and they’re starting to get used to it; it’s not something that’s foreign to them.”
Phenom AZ 14u identifies nearby Peoria as its base of operations, and is under what has become a rather large umbrella opened by the Southern California-based Phenom Baseball organization (Phenom baseball has teams entered in both the 14u and 16u PG WWBA West Memorial Day Classics this weekend). But the young players in the 14u event – all of whom will be sophomores, freshman or eighth-graders during the 2016-17 school year – are all facing the same challenges. As are their coaches.
The West Coast Braves Red, out of Whittier, Calif., and 20-year-old head coach Michael Alexander spent Friday afternoon becoming acclimated to their new surroundings, much as their opponents in the opposite dugout were trying to do.
“Everyone’s excited about playing in these great facilities and about the great competition we’re going to be playing against,” Alexander said. “We want them to appreciate the opportunities they’re going to have ahead of them by being here, and really just learning the little things about the game. Everyone here (is talented) so it’s the little things that are going to take them up to the next level.
“Wins and losses really don’t matter. We want to win, of course, but it’s the little things we want them to take away from this so they can grow as players and as people.”
The beautiful major league-quality fields and the use of wood bats leaves the players feeling like they’ve reached some sort of youth baseball promised land. Alexander enjoyed watching their reaction when they first walked onto the grounds at Camelback Ranch, but as a young coach and current college player, he was especially interested in watching his young charges swing the wood bat.
“You can’t just get away with cheap hits like you can with metal bats; you have to earn every hit that you get,” he said. “We’ve been playing wood bat tournaments to try to get used to them and we’ve been preaching to our pitchers to pound it inside. These are 14-year-olds using wood bats for the first time so our goal for the weekend is to collect broken wood bats from the other teams.”
Ah yes, the pitchers. Perfect Game is requiring full compliance with Pitch Smart guidelines at all of its tournaments this summer, which requires coaches to be even more on top of the way they use pitchers than they may have been in the past. The added diligence may be intensified more at the 14u level than during play in the older age-group tournaments.
Phenom AZ 14u’s Schooler, a native of the state of Washington, was himself a pitcher who was drafted by the Minnesota Twins out of Columbia Basin College (Wash.) in the 30th round of the 1993 MLB June Amateur Draft. He threw in 1993-94 at the Rookie League level and briefly in an independent league in 1998, so he knows a little bit about how to handle pitchers.
“it’s been a big challenge because a lot of them are still position players at this point,” Schooler said. “You want to get the work in that they need to prepare defensively, but they’re also pitchers. And we have a lot of our kids that catch, and they pitch, too; it’s the accumulation of a lot of wear and tear.”
It’s a delicate balance considering 14-year-old kids who love baseball don’t want to slow down. They want to play with their middle school friends during the spring and get involved in as many leagues as possible. Coaches and parents are faced with non-stop monitoring of how much their young players are throwing, and Schooler even admitted that sometimes he feels like he’s fighting a losing battle.
At this age, the prospects who are becoming serious about their futures in the game are really starting to develop their competitive natures, a quality essential for any elite athlete to possess. The ones who have decided they want to pitch at the next level – high school or college – want the ball handed to them more and more and it falls to the coach or a parent to temper their enthusiasm. Perfect Game scorekeepers will strive to assure the Pitch Smart guidelines are followed to the letter.
“It’s, ‘Do you want to be a superstar at 14 or do you want to be peaking at 18?’ There’s a lot of talk like that,” Schooler said. “I think it’s important to keep in mind the bigger picture in all of this.”
The West Coast Braves Red’s Alexander calls Los Alamitos, Calif., his hometown and he was a catcher and right-handed pitcher during his high school days. He played in three PG events in 2011, ’12 and ’13 with the West Coast Clippers, including the 2013 18u PG WWBA West Memorial Day Classic right here at Camelback Ranch.
After starting his college career at El Camino College in Compton, Calif., he transferred to Bethany College, an NAIA school in Lindsborg, Kan., where he will be a senior catcher in 2017. Although he is only six years removed from his days playing as a 14-year-old, he notices some differences.
“The game has grown a lot more and it will continue to grow,” he said. “And the kids, they’re just so much bigger now, so much stronger. And just the number of kids that are playing now, the number of kids on every team. It’s just going to continue to grow and grow and grow.”
With the game evolving before his very eyes, Alexander is facing many of the same challenges as Schooler when it comes to managing his pitcher’s workloads this weekend. He, too, has a roster full of kids who came here to play and not just for the ride; the delicate balancing act once again plays out.
“They’re still young and they’re still growing and it’s hard to get a good read because … because they want to stay out there and play,” he said. “You just have to learn to read the kid – and it varies from kid to kid – but we don’t want to push them too far. We want them to be healthy so they can play every day.”
Like Schooler, Alexander also has catchers who could be called upon to pitch, but because he has only two catchers on the roster it’s going to make it difficult to get them out on the mound. He did note that all but one of his roster spots are filled with players who can pitch an inning or two so no one will have to be overworked. “We had to leave our ego back in California as far as coming out here and trying to win the tournament. We’re trying to keep the kids safe and let them go out and have some fun,” he said.
Phenom AZ 14u scored 15 runs in the bottom of the third inning for a walk-off, run-rule 15-0 win over the West Coast Braves Red in the tournament-opener Friday afternoon. The AZ 14u’s collected only five singles but took advantage of 15 walks from three Braves Red pitchers to score the 15 earned runs. 2020 right-hander Mitchel Schooler celebrated his 15th birthday by throwing a three-inning no-hitter, walking three and striking out two. He threw 46 pitches, 24 for strikes.
Coach Aaron Schooler calls this team “an amazing group” the core of which has been playing together for the last two years. It’s enjoyed a lot of success already and that success has been achieved the “right way” according to Schooler. “It came through hard work and passion and effort and a dedication to doing things the right way,” he said. “I’m extremely proud of and loyal to my core group of eight or nine kids that I started with; I couldn’t be more proud.”