2015 Perfect Game High School Baseball Preview Index | Northwest Region Preview
It’s been an interesting winter on the suburban Portland, Ore., campus of Westview High School, at least in as far as the buzz surrounding the baseball program is concerned. The varsity baseball team roster makes up only about one-100th of the student population of 2,500 at Westview, but already five of the eight seniors on the team have signed letters to play college baseball during the next school year.
“We’ve been pulling for everybody and keeping everybody up to date (on the recruitment process) … and we’re always talking about colleges and how we can help by calling different coaches and all that kind of stuff,” standout senior catcher/third baseman/right-handed pitcher Parker Kelly told Perfect Game over the telephone last week. Kelly has signed with the University of Oregon.
“It’s fun to enjoy that process with your buddies; it’s awesome that they’re going through it too.”
Perfect Game projects Kelly to be selected in the first 10 rounds of June’s MLB First-Year Player Draft but if he does, in fact, end up on the Oregon campus in Eugene he won’t have to look far to find a familiar face. He and his good buddy Colton Sakamoto plan on being roommates during their freshman year.
“That’s a pretty cool little deal we’ve got right there. We’ve played all four years (at Westview) and now we’re going to be roommates at the next level if the draft isn’t an option this year,” Kelly said.
“It’s the goal of everyone in this program to go on and play at the next level,” Sakamoto told PG. “But we’re trying real hard not to focus on that right now. We’re just focusing on this upcoming season and what we can do to win a state championship.”
It is the last part of that statement that resounds with head coach Steve Antich, who begins his ninth year leading the traditionally strong Westview program. With those eight seniors being propped up by a strong group of six juniors, the Wildcats will begin their 2015 season next week recognized as one of the top teams in the six-state (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Wyoming and Washington) Perfect Game High School Northwest Region.
This team will try to put behind it the relative disappointment of the 2014 season that ended with a loss in the second round of the Oregon State Activities Association (OSAA) Class 6A playoffs and left the Cats with a 16-12 overall record.
“In a single-elimination (format), anything can happen,” Antich told PG last week. “Last year we came out flat and it kind of ended our season earlier than we hoped. The good news was, out of our regulars, we graduated only a single senior that played every day off of that team, so everybody else is back.
“Hopefully they remember that and, believe me, that’s something I’m going to bring up as often as I can to keep them motivated.”
This year’s Wildcats won’t need constant reminders to keep themselves motivated. The seniors, especially, are determined to finish their careers on an especially high note.
“We’re just refusing to lose,” Sakamoto said of the team’s mindset coming into the 2015 campaign. “We’ve always had great players and there’s always been great competition within our program but this year we really have something to prove. We have a lot of talent but that doesn’t always mean a whole lot. We just have to go out there and prove ourselves.”
IT MIGHT BE A STRETCH TO CLAIM THAT ANY PROGRAM THAT HAS BEEN around for just more than 20 years has a storied past, but Westview’s relatively brief history has seen its share of successes.
Westfield teams have won nine Portland Metro League championships since 1999 – five in seven years under Antich – and have advanced to the OSAA playoffs 15 times since 1994. The Wildcats finished as Class 6A state runner-up in Antich’s first season in 2007 and then won the 6A state championship in 2011.
“We talk about it all the time,” Antich said of the programs’ past successes. “We’re proud of it, especially the last eight or nine years that I’ve been here, but even before; it’s kind of central to who we are. Another thing is just competing and the best guy is going to win the job – no one’s given anything – so every day we go out and compete.”
Kelly, a four-year starter leads this team. He played in the Perfect Game All-American Classic last August and is ranked the No. 86 overall national prospect in the class of 2015 (No. 1 in Oregon). Sakamoto, a senior outfielder, is ranked as a top-500 national prospect (No. 9 Oregon) in his class and performed well at last year’s PG National Showcase in Fort Myers, Fla.
The other top seniors include 6-foot-4, 220-pound right-hander Teagan Lind (No. 11 Oregon, Washington State signee); 6-foot-6, 205-pound left-hander Mark Finkelnburg (No. 18, Loyola Marymount); outfielder Andy Schubert (No. 18, Western Oregon) and catcher Tyler Stofiel.
“We’re all really good friends on and off the field and it’s a good group of guys to be with,” Kelly said of this group of seniors. “When we got into high school we kind of got spread out (between various grade-level teams) so this is the first year we’ve got our core-group, our core-friends, back together.”
The top returning junior is third baseman/right-handed pitcher Kenyon Yovan, an Oregon commit ranked No. 127 nationally and No. 1 in the Oregon class of 2016. Yovan was named the 2014 Pitcher of the Year in the Metro League by The Oregonian website oregonlive.com after leading the league in innings pitched (56) and strikeouts (73) and finishing second in ERA (0.88). Junior infielder Keita Fabrega also returns after earning first-team all-Metro League recognition from oregonlive.com.
“Our lineup is going to change based on how guys are doing,” Antich said. “If a sub-varsity kid is doing well he’ll get brought up, and we just kind of run it kind of like a minor league system and we just talk all the time about working hard, hustling, the tradition that we have here and the high bar that we’ve set.
“Each new group wants to continue that … and we put a lot of responsibility on our seniors and each group knows that the next group of seniors is going to have to step into that and is going to have to fill that role, as well. That’s just kind of how we go about business.”
The programs’ history of success isn’t lost on its current players. The state championship in 2011 looms large but there has also been individual acclamations with four players – Mike Davies (1999), Trevor Crowe (2002), Jason Ogata (2005) and Carson Kelly (2011, 2012) – being named Oregon’s Gatorade Player of the Year.
“It means a lot to all of us,” Sakamoto said. “Growing up, I always looked up to guys like Jason Ogata, Trevor Crowe (and) Carson Kelly, and they really did a good job of setting an example as far as work ethic and how they carried themselves.”
“Baseball has become one of the staples here at Westview,” Kelly added. “We demand perfection and we want to be great. We don’t want to just be good in Oregon, we want to be good nationally and compete with the best of the best. We put in a lot of work in the community, all the way from Little League and T-ball all the way up to the high school level, it’s all a team.
“(The older guys) helped us so we make sure we stop and say hello to the younger guys in the program and give them some tips and some pointers.”
PARKER KELLY TRIES TO PATTERN HIS GAME AFTER THAT OF HIS BROTHER, Carson, a second-round pick of the St. Louis Cardinals right out of Westview in the 2012 draft. Carson, still just 20 years old, completed his third season in the minor leagues in 2014 at Class A Peoria in the Midwest League.
Parker joined the Westview varsity squad in the spring of 2012 when Carson was about to embark on his senior season, which culminated with his second straight Oregon Gatorade Player of the Year Award. The younger Kelly actually worked his way into the starting lineup that season, playing second base while Carson settled in at short.
“(Carson) demands perfection – that’s why he’s so great – and he instilled that in me,” Parker said. “We’re really similar but we’re also kind of different people; we’ve got different leadership styles and things like that. We’re best buds on and off the field, but we’ll get at each other a little bit just like brothers do.”
Antich said Carson, Parker and entire Kelly family have been great for the Westview program. He remembered Parker hanging around the Westfield offseason camps as a fifth- or sixth-grader about the time Carson was entering high school. When it was Parker’s turn to start his high school career, he jumped right in.
“Parker just came straight in (as a freshman) and did some things for us at the varsity level when we asked,” Antich said. “He’s a guy that has experience and he’s always been around … and I just know I can count on him; he knows what we do and he knows how we do it. Even though he was young he watched his brother win the state title and do a lot of those things, and it just makes it easy for me when I don’t have to explain what is expected or what we need.”
Kelly related that every year since he’s been in high school former players have returned to help coach, and his brother likes to come back and just hang out with Parker and his friends. “He likes to give some instruction and donate some time,” Parker said. “He wants to get back to where he came from and do the same things that our group is going to do when we’re out of high school.”
That does sound like a tradition this group of seniors will carry on. It fits their combined personality. “We have a really good group with (Kelly) and the rest of the seniors. They’re just super tight – we look at them as extra staff members – and they push each other,” Antich said.
Added Sakamoto: “We’ve been playing together since before I can remember and we’ve always been working out together and getting in extra reps. We’re definitely a close-knit group and that’s the beauty of our senior class at Westview.”
ANTICH CAME TO WESTVIEW BEFORE THE START OF THE 2006-07 school year after an extremely successful five years at South Medford High School in Medford, Ore., about 275 miles dead-south of Portland, almost on the border with California.
South Medford played in the Southern Oregon Conference at the time, and Antich led the Panthers to and SOC championship in 2004 and three straight trips to the Oregon Class 6A state playoffs in his five years there. It was during those trips to the playoffs where he became familiar not only with Westview but the entire Metro League because they were often paired in the early rounds.
“Some of the series we have and just how competitive the league is, sometimes you feel like you’ve played the state title game 10 times, 15 times over that year with that kind of competition and suspense and all that goes with it,” Antich said. “But it’s fun and you’d like to think it prepares you to face that kind of pressure come playoff time.”
“The Metro League is always tough and it will be again this year,” Sakamoto said. “There’s always great competition and it’s arguably the best league in the state, so we just have to go out and compete and prove ourselves in the Metro League.”
The Oregon State Activities Association allows baseball teams to travel out of state over spring break only every other year and Antich has taken advantage by heading down to the Phoenix area for the Coach Bob National Invitational in recent years.
“We’ve been to Florida a time or two but Arizona is just perfect,” Antich said. “We’re really excited about the competition in the bracketed tournament (National Division) that we’re in with teams from all over the country; it should be a lot of fun. Hopefully we’re up for it and our guys come out and play hard and we can show well down there.”
It makes no difference to this group of Wildcats whether they’re playing in the metro Portland area, in southern Oregon, in Florida or in the Arizona desert, they just want to play and they want to go out on top. They want to put behind them the disappointment of last year’s early exit from the playoffs and live by the motto, as stated by Antich, of “We’re going to be better, we’re going to do better; we’re going to work harder.”
A year from now, many of these seniors will be wrapping up their freshmen seasons in college. All will have moved on to the next chapter of their lives, wherever that may be. But in the here and now, they have their senior high school season to play regardless of how bittersweet that may be.
“This is my last ride with some of my good buddies who I’ve been playing with since I’ve been in fourth, fifth, sixth grade and it’s kind of pretty surreal to think that I might not be playing with all these guys later on,” Kelly said. “It’s been interesting; we’ve had some real good workouts and good team camaraderie. I played all over this summer … but there is nothing that beats high school ball, just getting out of class and then going to play with your buddies.”