FORT MYERS, Fla. – There are a lot of ultra-talented teams competing at this week’s 17u Perfect Game BCS Finals national championship tournament that started play on Monday with a lot of positive things going for them. Often times it can be something as simple as the name across the front of a jersey or the names of highly regarded prospects that fill a roster that can make a team feel blessed.
Chain National-Dobbs must have come into this event feeling doubly blessed. The “Chain” name across the front of the jersey becomes more widely respected with every PG national championship the organization wins. Its lineup is filled with eight prospects from the class of 2017 ranked in the top-500 nationally, including newly minted 2016 Perfect Game All-Americans D.L. Hall and Cole Brannen.
The Nationals-Dobbs entered their fourth of five pool-play games Thursday morning at the CenturyLink Sports Complex – the MLB spring training home of the Minnesota Twins – having won their first three pool games by a combined score of 27-0, which put them in a strong position to contend for the playoffs’ No. 1 overall seed at the halfway through the weeklong schedule.
“It’s where you always hope to be,” Chain National-Dobbs head coach Britt Dobbs said before sending his team out to face Nation Elite 17u Green, a squad that went 1-2-0 in its first three game. “You try to set up your pitching the best you can as the pool-play rolls on and then you try strategize it into the (playoffs), but sometimes that doesn’t work with the weather and the whatnot; that can mess you up, too. Most teams would rather get that higher seed and get a little break during the first part of the bracket but that doesn’t always work out.”
And as any veteran coach of Perfect Game national tournament play knows, getting all your pitching ducks in a row is the absolute key to success.
“There are a lot of really, really good teams here and usually the game is going to be determined on pitching matchups,” Dobbs continued. “If you have to burn all your pitching to get through the pool, then sometimes you’re at a disadvantage heading into bracket-play. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to set your pitching rotations up before the bracket-play gets here, that usually gives you a pretty good shot.”
On paper, the Chain gang looked like they had a pretty good shot before the first pitch was thrown. They have Hall, a left-handed pitcher/outfielder from Warner Robins, Ga., who is ranked No. 6 overall nationally and has committed to Florida State. They have Brennan, a left-handed swinging outfielder from Elko, Ga., ranked No. 27 nationally who has committed to Georgia Southern.
And they also have outfielder/first baseman/left-hander Josh Hatcher from Albany, Ga. (No. 163, uncommitted) and middle-infielder Austin Thompson from Rincon, Ga. (No. 384, Georgia Southern). Four other prospects who have played this week are ranked in the top-500 nationally.
“We all know each other so well, when you put us all on the same team together it makes the chemistry between us a lot better,” Brannen said Thursday. “We all go out there to play hard and to win, every one of us. That’s why we’re all on this team together. Some of these guys I’ll know for the rest of my life, there’s no doubt about it.”
Chain National won the 16u PG BCS Finals national championship last summer (it also won the 2015 15u PG BCS Finals) and about 75 percent of the players on this roster were on that 16u team. That includes nine prospects that were named to the all-tournament team (all 2017s):
Brannen, Hall, Hatcher, Robertson, right-hander Oakley Albinson, right-hander/third baseman Zack Brockman, catcher/infielder/right-hander Colin Moore, middle-infielder Mason Robertson, and shortstop Brooks Veal. Hall and Brockman were two of three Chain National pitchers that shared the Most Valuable Pitcher Award at the 2015 16u PG BCS Finals with their teammate and 2015 Perfect Game All-American Anthony Locey being the third.
“That experience helps a little bit,” Dobbs said of winning it all in 2015. “If we’re fortunate enough to get out of the pool and we’re fortunate enough to go deep into the playoffs, it won’t overwhelm them because they’ve been here before. But when you get into bracket-play there’s going to be a lot of 2-1, 3-2 ballgames and it’s just a matter of who got that clutch hit and who didn’t.”
Chain Baseball is based in Georgia but there is a reason the word “National” is in its name. The organization recruits nationally – especially in Florida – and this team has prospects from Georgia, Florida, Illinois, New York and Alabama on its roster. Dobbs feels like he is able to put together a team that can stand-up well against any in the country and the results certainly bear that out.
He used six pitchers who combined to throw 14 shutout innings in the team’s first three wins. Hall scattered three hits and walked three while striking out 10 in his five innings and work and Hatcher threw four no-hit, shutout innings with seven strikeouts and a walk in his start. Hatcher and Robertson combined on a five-inning no-hitter in Chain-Dobbs’ 8-0 win over Midwest Mojo 2017/2018 on Wednesday.
“This year’s staff is a little more athletic, if you will, than last year’s staff. It’s not so much a pitcher-only type of kids,” Dobbs said. “We’ve got a lot of players on this team that can (play both ways) so that gives me a lot of flexibility to move through these big, long tournaments.”
It is especially fun to watch Hall and Brennan play the game. They were certainly on PG’s radar as far as being invited to the PG All-American Classic in San Diego next month before they attended the PG National Showcase here in Fort Myers last month, but their performances at the National sealed the deal.
Brannen ran a sizzling 6.18-second 60-yard dash with a 1.37-second 10-yard split and threw 90 mph from the outfield during his workout session. Hall had his fastball sitting at 90-93 and topping out at 95, and he also showed a 75 mph curveball and 76 mph changeup.
“As baseball coaches, and we’ve been doing this for a lot of years, you can teach a lot of kids a lot of things, but there are some things that kids have that you just can’t teach,” Dobbs said. “When you see a kid running a 6.2 (60), it’s kind of special; you see a left-handed kid throwing 95 (mph), that’s also special. We’ve got a lot of talented kids but those are things that are above and beyond because you just can’t teach that. And when you see it, it’s fun to watch on a daily basis.”
Chain National-Dobbs saw any hope it might have had for a top seed in the playoffs vanish Thursday morning when it let leads of 3-2 and 4-3 slip away in a 5-4 loss to an unheralded Nation Elite 17u Green squad.
Through four games, Brockman is 4-for-4 (1.000) with two doubles, three RBI and three runs scored; Hatcher is 6-for-10 (.600) with a double, triple, four RBI and two runs; Brannen is 5-for-9 (.556) with a triple, six RBI and five runs and Veal is 4-for-8 (.500) with two doubles, four RBI and six runs. The bats have been popping, to be sure, and it’s to feel like the pitching will come back around for this team in its final pool-play game Friday.
The top-two teams from each of the 17 pools advance to the 34-team playoffs so the Nationals-Dobbs should still reach bracket-play, but it might be a slightly more difficult slog making it back to the championship game. Chain National’s 2015 16u PG BCS Finals championship team finished its run 9-0-0.
“We had the opportunity to win it last year we’re here defending that title, so we’re definitely going to do everything in our power to repeat,” Brannen said. “Everybody on this team knows how that felt to win it and they won’t forget it. That feeling we had is definitely a driving factor to try to win it again.”
The winning is great and a loss isn’t so great, but at the end of the day an organization like Chain National Baseball is really about more than winning and losing. As an example of what’s really important, Dobbs said that if he loses a ballgame and he’s not feeling very good about it, but on the way home he gets a call from one of his players informing him that the player had just been offered a college scholarship, the loss is quickly forgotten.
“That’s what we’re here for,” Dobbs said. “The winning and losing is part of it but we’re here to help these kids realize their dream of moving on to the next level, whether it’s a college scholarship or a pro contract. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing, and that’s why we do this whole entire thing.”