Patriots ready for first pitch

Patriots ready for first pitch

Marion hoping for repeat of last year’s success this baseball season

Marion School District The familiar ping of aluminum bats is ringing through John Robbins field once again as the Patriot baseball team prepares for the 2019 season. Last year, the Patriots won their first ever conference championship in the sport, but is the team ready to make another run for the title?

Marion lost six seniors from last year’s squad and will be trying to find an answer to fill in the gaps left by players like Tony Rudd at shortstop and Peyton McElroy at catcher. Marion head coach Pete Prater has been experimenting with his roster to see who could take over the vacant positions.

“We have players in spots right now that probably never imagined they would have a chance to play at the positions we’ve worked them at,” Prater said about replacing seniors on defense. “We’ve got some depth and we’re trying to find spots to get that talent out there. We’ve got a lot of depth, but they’re inexperienced, so we won’t have the quality of talent that our seniors gave us last year.”

Marion is returning a lot of talent on the mound from last year, but the order in which they will take the field depends on who is on the other side of home plate. Prater said he plans to fill in the catcher gap with other pitchers who are not scheduled for that day.

Junior Braden Wolford, senior Alex Obrien and sophomore Daedrick Cail have taken reps at the catcher position during the offseason. Each of the three made at least nine appearances as pitchers last season.

Prater will have several chances to evaluate his pitching staff in action before the conference season starts. The Patriots will be playing in several tournaments at the beginning of the year, including one at Nettleton scheduled to begin today, weather permitting.

“We’ll start eight different pitchers,” Prater said about the evaluation period that the tournaments provide.

“Once we determine who our top guys are, we can flip other spots on the team as well and get some guys some reps at other positions we may need them to play as the season goes on.”

Offensively, the Patriots will still try to crank out as many hits as they can, but small ball could be the difference in a lot of games come conference time. Prater emphasized his team’s wealth of speedy players and the situations that can come if they get on base.

“We lost some games last year because we didn’t put our big bats in good hitting situations,” Prater said about his offense. “We’ve got four or five guys that can run, but they’ve got to look for those bunt-forhits, for those pushes, for those hit-and-runs. It was new to them last year, so we’ve been building on it in the offseason.”

Last year’s conference title meant a lot to Prater in his first year with the program. However, his primary objective for this season is not a state title or even a second conference title, instead just wanting his team to get better with every game.

“Being in (coaching) for 20 years, I found out that you can make your goal the state title every year, but you’ve got to have luck and be good,” Prater said about his goals. “Sometimes the best team doesn’t win it all. I just want to build this program and focus on winning the next game on the schedule.”

The first game for the Patriots is at the Nettleton tournament this afternoon against the Stuttgart Ricebirds. First pitch is scheduled for 4 p.m.

By Tyler Bennett