College-aged baseball players will be without a junior team to play for this summer in St. Albert.
Last year the St. Albert Tabbies junior team played in the Sunburst League, along with the team’s more senior counterparts, the St. Albert Tigers. However, this year, there simply weren’t enough players to form a Tabbies team.
According to would-be player and general manager Jessy Beley, that’s because some players he expected to be on the team didn’t fulfil their commitments.
“Honestly, I was very upset,” Beley said of not being able to field a team. “It showed that a lot of the younger players out there don’t have the maturity. A lot of people left me hanging. They committed, but didn’t come. It’s very frustrating with all the hard work I put in too.”
Beley said he put in a lot of time on the phone and on Facebook contacting players in different locations about coming to St. Albert to play. He also attended camps to talk to players and now is seeing all his hard work go for naught.
Kurtis Millar, vice-president of junior operations and senior Tigers coach, said at least half of the players that had planned on playing for the Tabbies play college baseball in the United States. Some had suffered injuries and are staying in their college town rather than come home to Alberta, he said.
Originally, the Tabbies were supposed to have 17 players, but that was chopped down to 10 after some cancelled and others left to join other teams.
“You can’t really run a team with 10 guys,” Millar said. “If you have one guy stuck at work, or even if two guys are stuck at work, they’d have to forfeit the game.”
Some of the players that would have been playing for the Tabbies will still be suiting up for a ball club in Alberta, but in the North Central Alberta Baseball League (NCABL).
“I’ve got nothing against the NCABL, but they’re a AA league,” Millar said. “They definitely have a lot of AAA-[calibre] players, but I think the Tabbies would definitely be a stronger team and provide some better competition.”
Now instead of playing for the Tabbies, Beley will join the senior Tigers along with six players who planned to play for the Tabbies: Taylor Burns, Jeremy Goodall, Dan McDonald, Taylor Lavallee, Cody Ferby and Darren Adams. Burns (Saddleback Community College) and Goodall (Muscatine Community College) won’t be back in St. Albert for another week or two, until they finish school for the year.
Beley played his first game with the senior Tigers on Wednesday at Legion Memorial Park in an exhibition game against the Edmonton Prospects of the Western Major Baseball League, losing 16-8.
“They’re good college players, but we play in a very competitive league ourselves, and there’s a lot of good, really solid players,” said the 22-year-old third-baseman. “Every team can beat any team in the league this year.”
Beley said it’s the first time in a couple of years that he’ll be playing third base, returning to the position after recovering from his second surgery on his arm.
“We’ve got a really good ball club, we’ve got tons of pitching [and] a good hitting order,” Beley said. “We’ll just work on the little things and we’ll get the job done, no doubt.”
In their opening game of the Sunburst League season, the Tigers lost 11-4 to the defending senior AAA national champion Fort Saskatchewan Athletics.
The Tigers were supposed to play, on the road, against the Red Deer Stags on Thursday, but the game was snowed out. No date to make up the game has been selected yet.
The team plays a doubleheader against the Calgary Red Birds on Saturday at Legion Memorial Park, at 2 and 5 p.m., and the teams return to the diamond Sunday for an 11 a.m. game.
