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Leagues  | Story | 3/19/2021

History on Iowa Spring League's side

Jeff Dahn
Photo: Jackson Wentworth (Perfect Game)
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – When it comes to high-profile amateur baseball being played in the state of Iowa over the last quarter-century, the Perfect Game Iowa Spring League has no rival in terms of both its historical significance and its ability to entertain fans and scouts alike.

Over the course of its 25-year history – with 2020 being a bit of an outlier – 98 PGISL alumni have been selected in the MLB Draft – including five first-rounders – and 15 of them have made their Major League debuts.



On top of that, more than 900 have made commitments to college programs big and small, including many of the nationally prominent powerhouses from the SEC, ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac 12 and others, including the Ivy League.

Keeping it even closer to home, all 12 Iowans who have been invited to the PG All-American Classic are alumni of the PGISL. It’s a number that includes right-hander Jeremy Hellickson from Des Moines, who was at the 2004 PGAAC and went on to be named the American League Rookie of the Year while pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays during the 2011 MLB season.

But wait. It’s also a number that includes catcher Ian Moller out of Dubuque, a starter at the 2020 PGAA Classic just last summer who is signed up to play in the League for a fourth season in 2021. The names populate record books at just about every level of the game and that’s a great source of pride for PG Founder and President Jerry Ford, who continues to call Eastern Iowa home.

Ford, a highly respected veteran scout and college coach in the state, had been long-convinced that Iowa high school players were under-scouted and underserved, mostly because of the state’s summer prep season. There were very few ways the most talented Iowa kids could be seen by professional baseball decision-makers without scouts having to watch 50 games just to see 50 prospects, an unfeasible proposition.

“This distinct disadvantage was the reason Perfect Game was started and it quickly turned things around for the Iowa players,” Ford recalled during comments this week. “Scouts and recruiters could now spend a weekend at one location in Iowa and see all the top players compete with and against the best competition in the state, and now the best competition in some of the surrounding states, as well.

“The PG Leagues took one of the most difficult states for scouts to cover and turned it into the easiest state to scout.”

Judging by the look of many of the 2021 preseason rosters, the scouting community will have every reason to turn out in full force every weekend from now through the end of April. The event history tells us this will be the 26th year of competition in the PG Iowa Spring League, but with the 2020 season cancelled by the pandemic after just one weekend of play, 2021 will mark the 25th complete season, assuming it reaches its scheduled conclusion; there is no reason right now to believe otherwise.

Things were scheduled to get underway on March 13 but a combination of circumstances pushed opening day back to this weekend. Thirty-five games are scheduled for both March 20 and 21 and all 70 will be played at the Prospect Meadows Sports Complex just north of Marion.

Opening weekend will feature 32 squads based in Iowa; they’ll be joined by two Wow Factor Great Lakes teams out of Michigan and the Wisconsin-based CBT Wolfpack. By the time everyone’s accounted for and ready to get after it by mid-April, there will be more than 40 teams with close to 600 players taking part.

Twenty-one teams will play under the Iowa Select banner, a longtime nationally-prominent program based in Cedar Rapids. The Iowa Sticks program, with its base of operations in the Des Moines suburb of Waukee, has eight entrants.

“Obviously, getting the Iowa kids prepared for high school and their summer season is the most important thing, and being able to provide great opportunities with kids outside the state,” PGISL Director BJ Fish said this week. “Especially this year having a unique opportunity with states starting their high school seasons later, we’re able to have more out-of-state programs join.”

The powerhouse Wisconsin-based Hitters Baseball program will begin bringing teams over the weekend of April 10-11, and another top Wisconsin group, Greg Reinhart Baseball (GRB), will also start bringing teams next month. Those organization’s teams, according to Fish, will boast rosters that feature even more top prospects sure to draw the attention of MLB area scouts.

And another feature unique to this the ’21 PGISL season is that individual players from out-of-state are also signing up and being placed on one the existing teams. One example of that is 2021 outfielder/right-hander Markell Dixon, a top-500 Southern University recruit out of St. Louis who will be playing with Iowa Select Nordgren, coached by longtime Cedar Rapids baseball fixture, Gordy Nordgren.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the top teams from both the Select and Sticks programs are set to garner the most attention from the dozens of MLB scouts sure to be in attendance. And those two teams, Iowa Select Evans and Iowa Sticks Scout 2021, will meet in a much-anticipated double-header to kick things off Sunday morning.

Iowa Select Evans, coached by another longtime Iowa baseball fixture, Tim Evans, features a roster that touts eight D-I commits/signees from the classes of 2021 and ’22. It includes Moller, an LSU signee ranked the No. 5 overall prospect in the 2021 class, as well as his Dubuque Wahlert Catholic HS teammate, 2022 outfielder Tommy Specht (No. 51-ranked, Kentucky commit).

Eleven other Select Evans prospects are ranked as top-500s in their respective classes and all but one has already made his college commitment. In an interesting twist, Marion High School junior teammates, right-hander/infielder Owen Puk and right-hander/first baseman Jaqson Tejada, have both committed to Florida International; Puk is the younger brother of PGISL and PGAAC alumnus and current Oakland Athletics left-hander AJ Puk.

2021 outfielder/infielder Gage Franck (t-500, DMACC) is another student at Marion High and ’21 outfielder/middle infielder Coy Sarsfield (t-500, Iowa) lives in Marion but attends Linn-Mar High School on the north side of the city.

Iowa Sticks Scout 2021, coached by Evan Romanchuk, is also loaded with top-500 and D-I talents from all four prep classes (2021-24), led by ’21 right-hander Jackson Wentworth (No. 137, Kansas State) from Urbandale.

Other 2021 top-500s with the Sticks Scout 2021 include catcher Gehrig Christensen from Des Moines and shortstop Sam Petersen from Huxley, both Iowa signees; right-hander/corner infielder Easton Johnson out of Gilbert is a Creighton signee.

Right-hander/corner infielder Justin Hackett (t-500, TCU) from Winterset tops the 2022s, first baseman/left-hander Sam Harris (No. 295, Duke) out of Urbandale leads the 2023s and Des Moines left-hander/first baseman Blake Larson (No. 20, TCU) from Des Moines steps up as the top freshman.

Rosters for the teams from Hitters and GRB had not been submitted as of mid-week, but Fish said they will be loaded with must-see prospects, as is usually the case with those programs.

“Typically, we’ve had (Iowa Select), Hitters if they’re able to make it, and Sticks have three teams that have guys you’ll look at for the (MLB) Draft,” Fish said. “This year we’ll have up to five or six teams full of draftable players, so it’s going to be pretty cool those weekends when everybody’s down here in mid-April.”

Those players and more than 400 others will be building on a solid foundation of excellence that was first laid down when Jerry Ford organized the Iowa Spring League in 1996.

Perfect Game only came into existence in the first place because Ford, always a visionary, identified a critical need for getting Iowa high school players more exposure in front of the national scouting community. That exposure was sorely lacking because of the state’s high school association’s decision to play a summer-only prep season.

The vision was grand and the plan right on the mark, and the Iowa Spring and Fall Leagues greased the wheel to generate the juice that in turn allowed PG to become a national and even international brand. The Iowa kids not only began getting noticed but they began getting drafted and eventually many made their way to the major leagues.

“Our idea was working perfectly for Iowa players,” Ford said, “(but) we simply had to find a way to stay in business, so we went to Texas and we went to Florida. After a while we became profitable and have kept growing since; PG is everywhere. 

“So one could say Perfect Game is only what it enjoys these days because of that desire to keep giving Iowa kids the most opportunities possible of playing in the leagues.”

Every prep prospect drafted out of the state Iowa in the last 20 years, with one exception, played in the PGISL, as has every Iowa player who has made their MLB debut. And there have been four first-round selections: Marshalltown’s Jeff Clement (Mariners, 2005 Draft), Iowa City’s Jon Gilmore (Braves, 2007), Cedar Rapids’ AJ Puk (A’s, 2016) and DeWitt’s TJ Sikkema (Yankees, 2019).

Cedar Rapids’ Ryan Sweeney was the first PGISL grad to reach the Big Leagues, debuting with the White Sox in September 2006. Others quickly followed with Clement (Mariners) and Norwalk’s Joel Hanrahan (Nationals) following suit in 2007, and Clive’s Matt Macri (Twins) and Algona’s Brad Nelson (Brewers) realizing their dreams in 2008.

Former PGISL performers who are currently on Major League contracts or have spent time in the Bigs recently include Cedar Rapids’ Puk (A’s), Mitch Keller (Pirates) and Scott Schebler (Reds), Norwalk’s Matt Dermody (Cubs), Cascade’s Colin Rea and Grimes’ Anthony Watson (Giants).

After 26 years, it’s not at all difficult to reach the conclusion that the best is yet to come for the PG Iowa Spring League, which is the only non-professional league in the state that uses wood bats. The next 25 years and beyond promises further growth and development from a concept that initially struggled financially only to become the pillar of PG’s success.

“In the end...the desire and our necessity to keep the leagues in Iowa going is what caused us to expand,” Ford said. “And the PG leagues in Iowa were able to continue identifying and displaying players to the scouting and recruiting communities for two-and-a-half decades.”
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