Baseball teams readying for stretch drive

CHAMPAIGN — As April fades away and May appears, the baseball teams at Unity and St. Joseph are coming to a stark realization: It's time to cut the soft stuff and start playing ball.

I went to games at Unity and St. Joseph late last week, and both Rockets' coach Dan Cunningham and Spartans' coach Brad Allen talked about their team's focus and desire after the games. It was stunning how similar their thoughts were. Had I not been recording and writing down what they were saying, it would have been hard for me to differentiate between both coaches' quotes. They want their teams to zero in their focus and start ripping off wins. Both coaches think their teams are skilled enough, they just have to want it.

And I know what you're thinking, "Every team wants it," and in a way, you're right. But I've always been under the belief that of the three major sports, baseball has the most even playing field. Over the course of a full season (162 games in the bigs, 30-35 in high school) all teams will eventually play to their skill level, but in an individual game, anything is possible. The Washington Nationals are awful and everybody knows it, but in a one game situation they're just as dangerous as the Red Sox (and they've won 11 in a row).

The same thing is true in high school.

Unity and SJ-O aren't the best teams in Illinois — they have a combined record of 15-24-2 — but if they start playing hard and their kids really want it, you'll see them start gobbling up Ws. Whether it be home runs, stingy pitching or an aggressive base running game, the Spartans and Rockets will find ways to get wins. That's what good teams do, and that's what the coaches want out of their two teams.

“I went on the bulletin board last week and took all of our stats down, put up a 0-0 and a blank stat sheet and said ‘This is a new beginning. This is the beginning of the second half,’” Allen said Saturday after SJ-O won its third straight game. “You can have 5-12 hanging over your head and you can never get rid of it. What’s done is done, and the beauty of baseball is that every day is a new day and we always have a chance to start over.”

Cunningham thought Unity was preparing for its own run after a 23-12 thrashing at Warrensburg-Latham last week, but then the Rockets came home and dropped a 7-2 game he thought they could win against Maroa-Forsyth.

“Maroa is a very good team, they’re one of the better teams in the conference,” Cunningham said Friday. “But today it’s not so much that we lost as how we lost. Individually, our lack of preparation really hurt us. We could have beaten them, and I felt like we beat ourselves.”

He went on, "I think we proved to ourselves over there (at W-L) that we have the talent to compete. It’s decision-time now for them. They know what they need to do, now it’s just a matter of them getting it.”