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Summer Collegiate  | Story | 7/31/2018

Genord has bat, will travel

Blake Dowson
Photo: Joe Genord (Travis Larner)

Amsterdam doesn’t have a lot of Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League veterans on their roster year after year. The way the team’s general manager, Brian Spagnola, explains it, players spend a year in upstate New York playing for a championship and then move onto the Cape Cod League and the Major League draft. To put it into perspective, Amsterdam has seen 39 former players drafted in the past three years.

That is the caliber of player Spagnola and the rest of the Mohawk front office recruit annually. So to have a player like South Florida’s Joe Genord, PGCBL Player of the Year in 2016, back in the lineup this summer is a luxury the Mohawks almost never get to experience.



With Genord, it wasn’t expected either.

“A lot of juniors don’t set themselves up for summer ball,” Spagnola said of Genord. “His dad texted me after the draft and said it didn’t meet what he was looking for … He didn’t have a plan, and his dad told me Joe said if he played anywhere, he wanted to play in Amsterdam. Our roster was kind of set, but you never turn down a good player. You can always fit him into the lineup.”

Genord packs a lot of power into his 6-2, 215-pound frame. His bat finds its way into the lineup wherever he goes, and he is smack in the middle of everything Amsterdam does at the plate this summer. Through 37 games with Amsterdam, he has hit .301 with eight home runs and 41 runs driven in. That is on the heels of a junior season in which he hit .306 with a team-high 16 home runs and 53 RBI in 46 starts for a South Florida team that earned a No. 2 seed in the Deland Regional.

His bat is what caught people’s attention when he was in high school as well, competing at a number of Perfect Game events. Before landing at South Florida, Genord was a member of four Perfect Game All-Tournament teams and participated in the Florida Top Prospect showcase. His performances at those events earned him a spot on the Perfect Game/Rawlings Preseason High School All-American team and a selection in the 19th round of the 2015 MLB Draft by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Genord decided not to sign with the Dodgers, however, and instead took his talents to South Florida, where he hit the ground running. He hits almost everything, after all.

That includes American Athletic Conference pitching, which he tore into during his freshman season on his way to top-three team finishes in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. That success landed him in Amsterdam for his first stint as a Mohawk in 2016, where, surprise surprise, he didn’t stop hitting.

His 45 runs batted in were a league record at the time, and he also led the league in slugging (.526) and home runs (7). On top of the championship he won with Amsterdam, Genord was named PGCBL Player of the Year, No. 4 overall prospect in the PGCBL and a Second-Team All-Summer Leaguemember, named by Perfect Game.

Spagnola never thought he would see Genord again.

“He was a high draft pick after high school. I expected him to be next in line in the draft,” Spagnola said. “We get a lot of high-end freshmen that play here for a summer and then go play in the Cape, and then get drafted.”

Genord did move on after his first summer in Amsterdam. He spent the summer of 2017 playing for the Waterloo Bucks of the Northwoods League, where long bus rides and big crowds await almost every game.

“That experience was a grind,” Genord said. “Long bus rides, hotels pretty much every away game. You’re traveling from state to state and even Canada, so you have some long bus rides.”

And guess what? His bat followed him on every one of those bus rides. The home games, too. Genord hit .263 with eight home runs and 22 RBI in 36 games for Waterloo. His eight long balls paced the team; no one else hit more than five.

There is a theme here. It’s pretty easy to follow. Wherever Genord is, he can be counted on as a middle-of-the-order power bat. It was no different during his junior year at South Florida, and nothing has changed this summer while he is back in Amsterdam, chasing another PGCBL title with a new set of teammates.

Believe it or not, he is happy to be in Amsterdam this summer. He and everyone around him knows he has a professional future. That is coming in due time. For now, he is back in a town he likes playing in a league in which he has had a ton of success.

“I had a real good time here my freshman year,” Genord said of Amsterdam. “It was a blast. I loved the host family I had and I loved the team. It all made me want to come back.”

So it’s a summer of fine-tuning some things for the slugger. For Genord, that means spending some more time behind the plate.

He started 16 games behind the dish his freshman year at South Florida, but has tallied only one start there during his sophomore and junior seasons. Most have come at first base. Innings behind the plate are pretty much spoken for at South Florida (Tyler Dietrich led the nation in innings behind the plate last year), so the opportunity to catch this summer in Amsterdam gives Genord that much more appeal to professional teams.

“For me, I would like to catch more. It would help me draft-wise,” He said. “It would definitely bring my draft stock up. Through a team perspective at USF, they don’t need me to catch. But I like catching [in Amsterdam].”

His bat will still be the big-ticket item when he starts his professional career, though. And lucky for him, that bat never leaves his side.

“He can carry [your team],” Spagnola said of Genord. “He has the ability to carry the team for long stretches, and he’s gotten hot lately. The guys on the team can see, he can barrel balls up consistently and put on a show.”
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