After championship season, baseball team younger, but has strong pitching
OCEAN CITY – The Ocean City High School baseball team made it to the mountaintop last season, outlasting Pascack Valley through 14 innings on a brutally hot Sunday afternoon in June to win the Group III state championship.
In the gray chill of March, the Red Raiders are beginning that climb again.
“We set the bar high here. Our goal is always to win a state title,” said head coach Andrew Bristol, who led his team to the 2021 championship. “I try to preach to the kids, ‘When you step on the baseball field, expect to win.’ It doesn’t mean you’re always going to win but expect to win.
“They’re going to approach every game expecting to win. That’s going to always be our mindset, to always expect to win our games because we’ll be prepared. And we’ll put ourselves in the position to do so. And hopefully we do the right things and come out on top as much as possible,” he said, sitting in a cold dugout, just outside of the wind and spitting rain last week as his team got ready for practice.
Bristol has a mix of veterans pitching and mostly inexperienced players everywhere else.
Last year’s championship team came into that 2021 season inexperienced, coming off the canceled spring 2020 season, with a lot of players who hadn’t played varsity ball. The 2022 version of his team has a lot of inexperienced players as well, but they are mostly juniors, so Bristol’s squad is skewing younger.
“That’s going to be the inexperienced part, but when you have someone like Tommy Finnegan and Duke McCarron coming back on the front end of your rotation and Dylan Oliver, who was a starter on the mound last year and Dante Edwardi, you have four varsity experienced guys and then you have Riley Gunnels and Matt Pashley, who also pitched in varsity games, I have six guys who are coming back on my pitching staff with varsity experience so I feel pretty good about that,” Bristol said.
“The infield is going to be brand new as far as the starters,” he said. “The outfield, other than Duke, is going to be new guys. We’re faster this year overall. I think we’ll get better as the year goes on, just like last year, as the inexperience goes away.”
Bristol said senior captain Ricky Urban will be competing for catcher with Isaac Peterson, who is trying to come back from a knee injury. Shaun Repetti and Joey Brace are up for second base with Edward at short and freshman Evan Taylor competing for an infield job and a closer spot. The coach called Taylor “a really big prospect, a great freshman player.”
He said Pashley will be at third and Gunnels will play a little at first, a little at third and pitch. Colin Thompson is another freshman in the mix for the infield.
The Red Raider outfield, Bristol said, “is going to be good and going to get better. We have some good athletes who are varsity athletes in other sports, Jack Hoag and Pat Lonergan.” They also have McCarron and Oliver and Noah Herrington, “a big junior, a good bat, who is going to be out there.”
The coach said his batters are getting confident. They didn’t do well in their first scrimmage but in another pair of scrimmages they came alive and they scored about 35 runs
“We have a lot of scrimmages scheduled to get these young bats confident and more comfortable at the plate,” he said. “I think we’ll hit. I think we’ll do what we always do. We’re a team that’s built on scratching runs, putting pressure on defense, bunting, hit and run, things like that. We’re going to continue to be like that, hopefully.”
Back-to-back games
Bristol said a lot of teams have been switched around in the conferences and the setup is going to be different from past years.
“It’s different this year with baseball in the Cape-Atlantic League. You play every team in your conference back-to-back. That first week we play Mainland at home Monday (April 4) and away on Tuesday. Then you play Cedar Creek the next week home on Monday, away on Tuesday. You play everyone back-to-back. You can’t just throw your number one pitcher against these teams. You have to have a staff. I think that plays to our advantage. We have a couple of good pitchers so we’ll be ready for that,” Bristol said.
“I think our conference is new this year. They switched a lot of teams around. It’s going to be a dogfight like it always is. We have Mainland right off the bat. They’re going to be tough. Absegami is is going to be way better. Cedar Creek is always tough. Holy Spirit will be tough. I think the Prep still sets the bar as far as who you have to beat and Egg Harbor Township is very strong. We have St. Joe’s twice this year. They are going to be a tough team to play,” Bristol said.
“There are no down games in our conference. I think it’s one of the best conferences around.”
That is only going to help the Red Raiders once tournament time comes around. “I think it makes us playoff-ready. You don’t have to go far to schedule (tough) games. You have them right in your own conference,” he said.
By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
