JUPITER, Fla. – Early morning was rapidly brightening into late morning on Friday at the Roger Dean Complex and the games in the day’s first time slot were wrapping up with the final scores being recorded into the history books of the preeminent Perfect Game WWBA World Championship.
Day 2 at the most heavily scouted amateur baseball tournament in the world was just getting started and only two hours in, teams and their players were already experiencing equal doses of delight and disappointment. Baseball has a knack for bringing reality home to roost on both the positive and negative sides of the aisle.
Let’s be clear before going any further. A loss during pool-play on the second day of a mega five-day event like Jupiter is not a deal-breaker, not with the 25 pool champions and seven wild card entrants that will advance to the 32-team playoffs yet to be determined. The outcomes of the last 50 pool-play games scheduled for Saturday will ultimately determine how that 32-team bracket will look.
The players and coaches from the highly regarded Altamonte Springs, Fla.-based Scorpions/Giants Scout Team fully understood how all of the numbers will be tabulated. They also went to bed Friday night knowing that the 1-1-0 record they possessed after a loss to the 5 Star National Midwest (2-0-0) Friday left them in a less than enviable position.
The Scorpions/GST face the US Elite 2022 National (0-2-0) to complete pool-play at mid-morning Saturday knowing it’s a must-win if they hope to keep any shot at a playoff berth alive. Even with a victory, they’re going to need the Dirtbags Scout Team (1-1-0) to knockoff 5 Star and then have tie-breaker criteria work their way. It’s the nature of the beast and it’s now up to the Scorpions, one of the nation’s proudest programs, to conquer that beast.
This unwelcome scenario materialized after the Scorpions were beaten by the 5 Star National Midwest 4-1 Friday morning, a game in which the Scorps managed just two hits but were also walked 10 times, providing for plenty of baserunners.
“We just need to regroup,” Scorpions/GST third baseman and PG All-American Jayden Hylton said postgame. “We’ve got to start putting good at-bats together and stop wasting them – put bats on balls and get baserunners on. We had a lot of opportunities today but we couldn’t cash in. We had small hits here and there but we didn’t have them when they were going to count.”
Hylton, a Stetson commit ranked No. 47 overall in the class of 2022, isn’t the only PG All-American on the Scorpions roster. He’s joined in the dugout by Jackson Holliday, an Oklahoma State commit who came into Jupiter ranked No. 36 overall in the 2022 class; Holliday was in total agreement with his fellow PGAA.
“We have to have a winning mindset,” he said of Saturday’s approach. “We need to come out and score a lot runs and not allow many runs and just win. … We had a lot of opportunities to score and put the game away but we didn’t capitalize. I feel like we can for sure do this. I feel like we’ll come out motivated and ready to win.”
Things started well enough for the Scorpions/Giants Scout Team here on Florida’s central Atlantic Coast when they opened play Thursday with a resounding 8-2 win over the Dirtbags Scout Team out of North Carolina.
2022 catcher Brody Donay (No. 221-ranked, Virginia Tech commit) was a triple short of the cycle with a single, double and a home run, and finished with two RBI and three runs scored; 2022 outfielder Jordan Taylor (No. 64, Florida State) delivered a pair of singles and a double and drove in three runs; 2022 Joshua Hogue tripled and drove in a run and ’22 Cameron Smith singled with an RBI. 2022 right-hander Ryan Fry (No. 408, Miami), allowed one run on one hit and struck-out six without a walk in picking up the win.
That offense all but disappeared Friday, although the 5 Star National Midwest pitchers weren’t throwing much of anything over the plate as 10 walks will attest. 2022 outfielder Nico Banez (t-500, Dartmouth) singled in the top of the third and Smith added a single in the fifth for the Scorpions only two hits; they scored their only run on a sacrifice fly off the bat of Hogue in the fourth.
Manager/GM Johnny Goodrich, a longtime fixture on the Florida high school baseball scene, stressed that the majority of the players come to the Scorpions as opposed to the Scorpions seeking-out the players. He believes they like what the organization stands for and how it goes about its business, but mostly they like how much pride the coaches and directors take in the development of their players.
Although every one of these players are extremely talented young prospects, Goodrich has the ability to look at them and know that no one at this level is a finished product. So the people within the program just try to clean things up a little around the edges and make sure the players are as close to ready for competition as possible.
“We try to leave no stone unturned, obviously, and on the other side of it we really go after kids that fit the character mode,” Goodrich said. “We may not win every game but it’s a joy to be around the players we get to be around because they’re quality human beings and great baseball players.”
So here is this extremely talented roster that boasts, with only a handful of exceptions, players from the classes of 2022 and 2023 who are ranked as top-500 prospects or better.
They are overwhelmingly from Florida but elite players like Oklahoma ’22 shortstop Holliday and Mississippi ’23 shortstop/right-hander Hudson Calhoun (No. 313, Ole Miss) are welcomed additions.
Some of the other top Florida guys from the 2022 class in addition to Hylton, Taylor and the others previously mentioned include catcher Austin Fawley (No. 454, Kentucky) and top-500s in left-hander Justin Jackson (South Florida), first baseman Jack Bello, infielder Michael McAloose, outfielder Evan Griffis (Stetson), first baseman Simon Kohn and right-hander Evan Chrest (Jacksonville).
Don’t overlook the 2023s either, with outfielder Jake Kulikowski (No. 60, Miami) and right-hander Chance Fitzgerald (No. 114, Florida State).
“Everybody jells together so much it’s not like it’s really hard getting along with other people,” the talented Taylor said. “I like to accept people who are really nice and we become teammates pretty quick so it’s not hard to jell with each other.
“Our team is pretty fun. The energy is contagious and when we get going all of us are having fun. You try to have fun on the field and then everything else will kind of play out.”
Added the PGAA Hylton: “Being a part of this team is amazing. It’s a good group of kids who come out here and play their hearts out. It’s just great being around these kids every day.”
There is an unusual yet very intriguing dynamic associated with Jupiter, one in which every team in attendance professes its desire to win the championship while also trying to showcase their top players in front of more than 1,000 scouts from both the professional and collegiate ranks. The whole environment surrounding the event does tantalize the senses.
The PGAAs Holliday and Hylton are at the WWBA World Championship for a second straight year, although the 2020 rendition is a bit of an outlier because it was moved across the state to Fort Myers due to Covid restrictions in place in Palm Beach County. It’s an especially cool environment for Holliday, who has a bit of a recent past in this city.
“This is really neat,” Holliday said, adding that he knows his way around the neighborhood because his dad, former NL All-Star Matt Holliday, spent numerous spring trainings here when he played with the Cardinals, who train at the Roger Dean Complex.
“I lived in Jupiter for a long time so I came to this tournament and watched the older guys; now to be able to play in it is really neat. It really does bring out the competitiveness in you and the will to win. You want to be on top and it definitely gives you that.”
Taylor, on the other hand, is getting his first taste of the Jupiter experience. But with the Scorpions in their “must-win” mode Saturday, he’s trying to keep his blinders in place.
“This is definitely neat seeing all the scouts out here but you can’t really look at it too much or it’s going to get you off your game,” he said. “It’s about coming out here and playing as a team more than worrying about what’s out there. We’re playing a game and we’ve seen (some of) these teams throughout the summer so it’s definitely like a regular game for us.”
The message the Scorpions/Giants Scout Team staff conveys to the players coming into an event that carries the prominence and the respect of Jupiter never varies or never gets off track, and it resonates because of the insistence on a team-first approach.
They talk to the players about competing, always giving their best and supporting their teammates. They insist the focus should be playing for the people inside the fence and not outside the fence (i.e. scouts). The coaches have been around baseball for a really long time and feel like it’s their responsibility to reduce as much as possible some of the pressures their players are feeling.
“Every day you play you learn something new,” Taylor said. “You learn more about your game and maybe see something else that somebody does that you can implement into your game. Everyday you’re just trying to get better yourself. You just look at what you did and look at what somebody else did and add that to your game so you can better the next day.”
Or, as Goodrich put it: “If it’s about the team then I think things become a little bit easier; if it becomes about ‘me’ things become a little more difficult. The biggest challenge is that … you’re just trying to create the camaraderie that’s necessary to be a good team and understand how to be productive in certain situations; that’s never an easy thing. The win is never final and the loss is never fatal and there’s going to be other games after this one. Just keep going and keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
It’s all a part of the Jupiter experience, even when the lesson of dealing with losses is one that must be learned. This also likely brings to a close the overall Perfect Game tournament experience for the seniors on the Scorpions/Giants Scout Team roster, which is bittersweet in many respects.
“I think this is a special time for them,” Goodrich concluded. “This is the end of their travel ball career and everybody wants to go out on top and it’s not possible for everybody. So, it’s about just taking the moment and enjoy it because this is the last hurrah when it comes to travel baseball.”