The new-look St. Albert Tigers showed their stripes at the senior AAA baseball team’s home tournament last weekend.
With a revamped lineup after previous non-winning seasons in the Sunburst Baseball League, the Tigers gutted out two victories and pushed the provincial champion Sherwood Park Athletics to the limit while splitting four games at Legion Memorial Park.
“We’ve got about three quarters of a new team with a lot more youth and a lot more speed. We’re not so slow this year,” said outfielder Conor Bronson, 20, a returning Tiger from last year’s 4-14 Sunburst regular season.
The tournament results doubled the number of wins in league play for the 1-5 Tigers in the four-team Sunburst circuit.
“The younger guys are finding their way in what men’s league is all about and the level of baseball. It’s a little bit of a higher brain game than what midget AAA is. You can get away with some things in midget AAA, but in the men’s league it's a higher baseball IQ for a lot of players so our young guys are figuring that out,” said player/coach Brad Wolansky. “Right now we’ve kind of hit a good stride with what we have in our lineup and things are starting to turn around. That’s the reason why you’re seeing more wins. The guys have just figured out how to play and what it takes to win at this level.”
The Sunburst record is somewhat misleading, according to third baseman Evan Hoffman.
“We’ve been in some games and just blown them late so we’ve got to play a complete game and we’ll be just fine,” Hoffman said. “Every game has been a little bit different. We’ve had some solid pitching, we’ve had some good defence, but it’s always been in spurts."
The Tigers lost five in a row before knocking off the Confederation Park Cubs (8-3) in spectacular fashion 12-0 in the last game before the tournament.
“We had a rough start to the season and then we started to bounce back,” Bronson said. “Our pitchers keep doing their thing to give us a chance and our bats started coming alive and that’s helped so it’s just all meshing together right now.
“There is a turnaround so we should have a good strong push to the end of the season.”
Leading the charge are high-end players fresh out of midget with academy and post-secondary school baseball experience.
“It’s been really great to see a lot of the guys come out and they’re really great kids. Some of the leaders on our team, like Mat Brisson and Brad, have done a great job of recruiting guys and just building relationships with the (St. Albert) midget program so it's been awesome,” said Hoffman, 31, a sixth-year Tiger. “I used to be one of the young guys and now I’m the old guy. It’s weird.”
In pool play at the nine-team tournament, the Cardinals defeated the Calgary Longhorns 5-4 and the 18U AAA St. Albert Cardinals 7-5 in an extra inning for a berth in Saturday’s championship bracket with the Athletics and Calgary Wolfpack.
Hoffman summed up the results as “great pitching, great hitting, great defence” by the Tigers.
The play of the game against the Longhorns, if not the entire tournament, was Bronson gunning down the tying run at home plate to seal the deal in the bottom of seven.
“There were runners at second and third with one out and we were up by one run and I got a fly ball and I was able to get a good throw and Brad made a nice catch and tag and we ended up winning the game on it,” said the right-fielder, who was confident on making the out. “I always think I have a chance if I’m throwing it and Brad made a good play at home to get him so it ended up working.
“It feels like cloud nine to make a play like that. Any chance to win a game and help your team out like that, it always feels good.”
The Saturday night feature game against the Cardinals, last year’s Tier I provincial champions and fourth-place team at nationals who are one of the top Norwest 18U AAA league teams at 15-5, was too close to call tied at five after seven innings.
“We let them hang in with us for a little bit. We wanted to keep more people in the tent a little later and sell some more beers,” Hoffman said of the tournament's luxury box filled to capacity with enthusiastic fans. “They’re a good team. They’ve got a lot of really good kids and it was a fun game. It was exciting.”
Bragging rights were at stake, especially with the number of Tigers who played for the Cardinals last year.
“It’s always a fun game to play. They were loud, we were loud. It’s just a fun game to play when everyone is into it and it’s hard to beat that feeling,” Bronson said.
Tylor Jans drove home Zach Froment to break the tie and Logan Blumhagen was stellar in long relief.
“That was a big RBI and we were able to close it out from there. Blum threw his ass off the last five innings and he got it done for us,” Bronson said.
Blumhagen was coming off six shutout innings versus the Cubs and against his former midget team gave the Tigers a chance to win.
“He really shut the door,” Wolansky said. “Settling down on the mound was big for us in limiting what they could do as well as just grinding away at our at-bats and making sure that we were having quality at-bats and putting balls in play and making them hurt when they made a mistake and that really keyed us to the victory."
In the championship bracket against the A’s, who pushed a run across in the sixth to make it 7-4, the Cardinals rallied in the top of seven to tie it up and in the bottom half of the inning with two outs and the bases loaded walked in the winning run.
“In years past we’ve kind of folded when we’ve been down in the late innings and we actually fought back and stayed with them so it was really awesome to see. We’ve just got to clean up some stuff early in the game,” said Hoffman, who clubbed his third homer of the season into the tall trees behind the left-field fence and the two-run blast with two out knotted it at seven.
“He made two really good pitches to get up 0-2 and he just left a breaking ball up and in and I just managed to put a good swing on it,” said the Regina baseball product.
“It’s good to see us come alive and we all pushed through with that huge hit by Hoff of course,” Bronson added. “Unfortunately, we let it slip away, but it was good to see that push.”
Wolansky was thrilled to see the Tigers battle the A’s until the final out.
“I loved it. The no quit attitude of the younger guys is great whereas in past years we maybe shut it down a little bit early, but these guys keep working, they keep grinding in their at-bats and it pays off. We put good swings on baseballs and good things happened,” said Wolansky, who replaced Nathan Coffin behind the plate after the veteran Tiger suffered a lower-body injury catching the last-warm-up pitch by reliever Colbey Klepper, who was thrown into the fire with the bases loaded and two out in the bottom of seven and on six pitches walked in the game-ending score.
The last game for the Tigers was the 8-1 loss to the Wolfpack
“They’ve got ball players. They’re a good team,” Wolansky said
The Wolfpack eventually ran out of pitching as the A’s mercied the Calgary senior men’s league team 15-5 in the final.
Despite the threat of rain, the tournament went off without a hitch as all 16 games were played. The tournament has been rained out eight times since 1991 and in 2016 it was cancelled before the first pitch was thrown because of a heavy downpour.
“We’ve got to thank the grounds crew because it was pouring this week and they worked their butts off to get us in here," Bronson said. "It's always a fun tournament. You’ve got a good atmosphere, teams from everywhere come around to play in it and and it's just a lot of good ball."
Sunburst action continues this week for the Tigers against the A’s (3-6) at 7 p.m. at 7:30 p.m. Friday in St. Albert.
