FORT MYERS, Fla. – Early last week, when Dig In Baseball head coach Steve Ballance first got a look at the pool pairings for this week’s 17u Perfect Game BCS Finals, he saw that his relatively young squad was in a grouping about as diverse as it gets at a PG national championship event held in Southwest Florida.
Joining his Gaithersburg, Md.-based Dig In Baseball squad were the East Cobb Pride 17u from Cartersville, Ga.; Elite Baseball Training-Premier 2017 from Chicago; the Florida Pokers Upperclass Carolina out of Pembroke Pines, Fla.; the IBAHS Knights-Black from Puerto Rico; and the Texas Fire out of Austin.
Ballance wasn’t 100 percent sure how to critique the list of his team’s pool brethren. He only knew that he brought a team south to one of PG’s premier 17u tournament events that he felt would be able to hold its own against many of the 102 teams in attendance, and his team was in a six-team group that included squads from Maryland, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico.
It was, actually, exactly what Ballance was looking for. The Dig In Baseball organization tries to send each of its age-group teams to at least two major PG events a year, with the BCS Finals in the summer and the PG WWBA Underclass World Championship in the fall as their favorite targets. He does that so his teams can see the world, so to speak.
“We love the way Perfect Game does things and for us this is the pinnacle of the year,” Ballance said late Tuesday morning before his team took the field at the Player Development 5-Plex for its second of five pool-play games this week. “With this team, our summer season started early this year so this tournament will end our summer.”
He knows the challenges and he’s realistic about them. The younger teams in the Dig In organization often experience a lot of success, especially at regional tournaments, but when the older high school-aged teams, 17u and 18u, come into a PG national championship tournament its often a different story. The Dig In players are going to be going head-to-head with some of the top prospects in the country at the 17u PG BCS Finals, some of whom may very well be first-round picks in the 2017 MLB First-Year Player Draft.
“Anytime you come down here to Florida you know you’re going to have the best of the best,” Dig In Baseball 2017 standout Drew Ehrlich said Tuesday. “We love coming down here and being able to compete against these (highly regarded) teams.”
Dig In opened play on Monday in grand fashion, topping the IBAHS Knights-Black, 10-4. Ehrlich went 3-for-3 with a triple and a run scored, Kevin Finn smacked a two-run single and Connor Brady and Hunter Forsyth each drove in runs with sacrifice flies. It was a great start to what promises to be an interesting week of play for the Marylanders.
“We came in ready to play, going up against a pretty good team coming in from Puerto Rico,” Ehrlich said of the opening day victory. “We wanted to come out and kind of make a statement that we’re here to play and we’re here to win ballgames.”
Fifteen names fill spots on this Dig In Baseball roster with six 2017s, eight 2018s and one 2019 on board, making it a young team for a 17u PG national championship event. None of the players’ names can be found in Perfect Game’s national prospect rankings and none of them have committed to college baseball programs as of yet. The number of college commitments will most certainly grow but there is no guarantee about the rankings. It is, as they say, what it is.
“The main thing is just getting involved in this competition,” Ballance said. “We’re lucky that in the region we’re in we get to see a lot of the Virginia teams on a regular basis … and it would be nice to stay home and play all those teams right around us but we just don’t have that kind of flexibility. We like to try to do things like Perfect Game where we can play teams that are most of the time better than us on paper going in and then go from there.”
There are two other teams out of Maryland competing here this week: Stars Baseball 17u from Upper Marlboro and TCP 17ju from Bowie.
Ballance and his partner, Will Frazier, started Dig In Baseball in 2011 and fields teams of 10-year-olds all the way up to 22-year-olds. Ballance formerly coached at Anne Arundal Community College in Arnold, Md., and is currently the head coach at Glenelg (Md.) High School, and he never takes his coach’s cap off his head; Frazier is the same way.
“We’re going to constantly coach the whole game, no matter what the score is, winning or losing, because we’re all about development,” Ballance said. “We try to engrain that in the guys, whether they’re working on different positions or whatever they’re doing on that particular day, and obviously we talk about college all the time because that’s the end-goal for everybody.”
College plans aside, the No. 1 goal that Ballance set forth for this team at the beginning of the summer was for it to play competitive baseball. He only asks the players to go out and play good, fundamentally sound baseball and he’s willing to let the chips fall where they may from a wins-and-losses perspective.
The idea is to win as many ballgames as possible, of course, but Ballance is going to win those games while making sure every kid on his bench gets the playing experience they expect and need and, more importantly, the experience they deserve.
The city of Gaithersburg, Md., is located northwest of Washington, D.C., and is considered part of the Washington-Arlington, Va.-Alexandria, Md., Metropolitan Area. The Dig In Baseball players’ hometowns are indicative of that footprint: they come from Maryland cities like Chevy Chase, Silver Spring, Rockville and Annapolis. It’s an area of the country rife with American history and also a place where there is some pretty good baseball being played.
“Maryland (high school) baseball is a lot stronger than people think. I think we’re definitely overlooked in the grand scheme from around the country,” Ehrlich said. “Places like Texas, California and Florida are obviously known as great baseball states – which they are – but I think the baseball in Maryland is pretty good, too. There’s good competition and some good ballplayers come out of Maryland.”
It is, perhaps, a little-known fact that seven baseball Hall-of-Famers are native Marylanders, including the son of a Baltimore saloon-keeper who became known as Babe Ruth. Other colorful Maryland natives from bygone eras who are in the Hall include Home Run Baker, Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx and more recently, Al Kaline, a 15-time All-Star for the Detroit Tigers who played between 1953 and 1974.
Even with that legacy, the Dig In Baseball players need an experience like the 17u PG BCS Finals to grow their games and find their place in the spotlight. It gives them a presence on a national stage they aren’t likely to get at home, and all it takes is one standout performance in front of the right set of eyes and the event could be a life-changer for a select few of these young men.
“That’s what I like about Perfect Game,” Ballance said. “It’s the ultimate place to be able to showcase your abilities, play real baseball with the idea of winning and it puts everything you want into one. … Everything here is a learning experience because our guys, depending on when we get them along the ranks, need to learn different things.”
Ehrlich said he appreciates being given the opportunity to perform here this week and he’s also appreciative of every opportunity his association with Dig In Baseball has provided. He’s the only player on the team that calls Annapolis home and the only one that attends Gilman High School but he’s become close with all of his teammates just by playing with them and against them for the last three or four years. “It’s a pretty good group,” he said.
Dig In Baseball dropped its second pool-play game to the East Cobb Pride 17u, 6-1, early Tuesday afternoon. There weren’t a whole lot of highlights in this one, although Nick Mallus doubled and drove in his team’s only run and Joe Curtin singled twice, accounting for two of Dig In’s other four hits.
But something else stood out at the end of Day 2 at the 17u PG BCS Finals. A quick glance at the Pool A standings revealed that all six teams stood with identical 1-1 records, and since the top-two teams from each of the 17 pools advance to the 34-team playoffs, everything is still very much up for grabs. But that’s not what Ballance is worried about.
“The main thing is for them to be competitive,” he said. “For sure, we’d love to be one of the two teams that makes it into the playoffs out of our pool and obviously we know that’s a daunting task out of our group. We were fortunate enough to pull off the win against IBAHS (Monday) but our main thing is to be very competitive and give ourselves a chance. If that gets us into the playoffs, we’ll take it.”