I’m Cameron White, author of The Big Fly, and I’ll be making a guest post here on The Dugout. Brett has done a good job of chronicling our baseball season at Catawba and giving some love to the unsung heroes we’ve had throughout the year. In his last post, he talked more about the team than individual players, so I’ll be talking about who I feel were the heroes from our midweek game against Wingate and our weekend series against Carson-Newman where we clinched the regular season title. Interestingly enough, all four of the people I’m going to talk about are in their first year at Catawba.
The first name to recognize is freshman 3B Chris Dula. I truly can’t say enough about how well Chris has performed this spring. It’s never easy for a freshman to step in to the lineup and play, never mind to play as well as he has. He’s been far and away our most consistent hitter, and this weekend was no different. After going 0-5 at the plate in game one on Saturday, he made sure it didn’t happen again.
Chris stepped up to the plate in the 4th inning with us down 3-0 and smacked a 3-run homer to left field to tie the game. He came up to the plate again in the 7th with us leading 4-3, and after taking two straight breaking balls for strikes, crushed the 0-2 fastball way over the left field wall to extend the lead to 8-3. He showed how good of a hitter he is by not panicking when he fell behind in the count 0-2. He jumped all over a mistake, something all good hitters do.
Another hitter I want to talk about is Blake Houston. Like Chris, Blake has been a fixture in our lineup in his freshman year with the Tribe. At the beginning of the season, Blake took some lumps both at the plate and on defense, but as the year has progressed, he has looked much more comfortable.
His batting average is slowly beginning to rise as he has started to use the whole field, and he has drawn his share of walks. Three of them came on Friday night. He used his terrific speed to drop down a great bunt on Saturday, and his speed has allowed him to make some great catches in center field. His passion to the game cannot be ignored, and his steady improvement has been key to our success.
On the mound, JJ Jankowski’s performance in game one of the Saturday doubleheader deserves mentioning. J.J. has been terrific all season after transferring in from Miami University of Ohio, but Saturday’s outing was one of the most dominant starts I’ve seen since I’ve been at Catawba. He threw eight innings and gave up just three hits while striking out 13. Every time J.J. takes the mound, we know he’ll give us a chance to win. He has outstanding stuff and he made it look extremely easy on Saturday.
On Tuesday at Wingate, Coach Gantt handed the ball to Joe Kase for the start. It was his first action in almost a month, so nobody was sure exactly what to expect. After giving up a first inning homerun, Joe really settled in and did a nice job against our rivals. Joe struggled a bit early in his first year at Catawba after transferring in from a Florida junior college, but has made three very good starts during midweek games and has emerged as another good option on our already deep pitching staff.
Tusculum comes to The Reservation this weekend, and they are always a tough team to play because they do so many things well. Every time we play the Pioneers, it seems to be a competitive, well-played game. After that, we travel to Forest City for the SAC Tournament, where we can clinch an automatic bid to regionals by winning the tournament. We have played very good baseball during the tournament the past two years, so hopefully we can keep that success going. This season has been a great one, and we’re doing what we can to extend it as long as possible.
Thanks to my teammate and roommate Brett Underwood for letting me make this guest post on The Dugout.
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