The Sedona Red Rock High School spring varsity season for the Scorpions will get underway on Friday, Feb. 23, at 3:30 p.m., when the baseball team takes on the St. Johns Redskins, complete with free hot dogs.
The team is entering this season with optimism because of a deeper pitching bullpen and more experience after going winless last season.
“I’m excited about this year and I’m especially pleased by what I saw in the practices [we’ve] had of the potential of the pitching, which was always a struggle last season,” head coach Stephen Hanks said. Hanks will be returning for his second season.
“On top of the fact that we really didn’t have enough pitchers, when you have a shaky defense, the pitchers end up having to throw a lot in the games,” he said.
“We’re a fairly young team, we don’t have a lot of seniors,” assistant coach Andrew Chandler said. “If these kids stick with it, we’ll be able to develop them. It seems like the cycle here is that a lot of kids don’t stick with the sport … I think it has to do with the beginning stages [because] there’s no little league here. So you don’t build those fundamentals right off the bat, and they just lacked the opportunity.”
Hanks stressed the importance of a deep bullpen at the high school level because of pitch count rules and said that it is almost vital to have between four and six pitchers in a given game because a player might only be able to throw a couple of innings.
“Yonas Rahman is one of the kids that I think could be a big addition on the pitching staff,” Hanks said. “He’s a junior, and he’s been on the varsity basketball team. He was on the baseball team but he was hurt last year and couldn’t play. He’s coming back and he’s a tall kid with a long arm. I caught him in the gym on Friday and was impressed with his velocity and control, considering he hasn’t pitched for two years.”
“I just want to improve as a team,” Rahman said. “The biggest thing I want to improve on right now is my fielding because of our pretty uneven field. It’s kind of hard to judge where the ball is going sometimes. We’ve done a good amount of pitching so far already during practice, which [has] helped just getting used to our mound.”
Nathyn Eberlen will also be pitching this season and said he had seen marked improvement during the off-season by getting extra coaching on his pose.
“If we can keep to our infield [we] will be a great team,” Eberlen said. “Outfield’s a little bit of a struggle, just because of the newer freshmen and newer guys aren’t really familiar with being able to look up and gauge how a ball is going to drop.” He added that his goals for the season are to “get a lot more pitches in, get some good strikes in and just make a lot of good memories. [Because] you’re in high school for four years of your entire life.”
Junior Erick Guerra has been training for the mound as well.
“I want to help the team, I really want to win this season this year,” Guerra said. “Last year, we didn’t have that many pitchers, and we struggled a lot. I’m able to pitch, I’ll be able to contribute to the team … I just need to work on accuracy, a little bit on velocity, but I’m getting there.”
Opposite the mound will be the Scorpion’s team captain and catcher, junior Nic McAtee.
“One of the positives that occurred last season in spite of the fact that we didn’t win any games,” Hanks said. “Coaching the team for a whole year allowed me to get a handle on what all the kids could do and that were going to be coming back, and [McAtee] really developed as a catcher last season when he was starting the year as an infielder.”
McAtee will be bringing nearly a decade of baseball experience to his role, and said that self and team improvement were his goals for this season.
“I’m going to try to motivate them and get them pushed to get motivated to win,” McAtee said. “You go [about that] by hyping them up … and just saying, ‘Guys, we gotta go, we gotta go.’ And then whenever they’re down, you just got to be like, ‘If we do this, this, this and this,’ we’ll win. All you have to do is set many goals for the team to accomplish.”
McAtee is also working to reduce the number of fielding errors this season.
“Baseball is a game of mistakes,” McAtee said. “So the less mistakes a team makes, the better the team is going to play. You motivate them to make good throws, make good catches and you just have to keep that high energy so they make less mistakes.”
Field Condition
“It’s not very good, but it’s an improvement [over] last year at least,” Chandler said. “Last year, there was cactus in the outfield, which that’s gone … Last year, we were missing balls left and right, because there’s potholes in the field and weeds. So they did a better job, but it really needs a big facelift.”
Athletic Director Pedro Ortega Sr. estimated that the baseball field’s condition has improved by 20% to 40% from the work during the fall.
“We have been working on that and obviously we got some companies to work on that so we had to keep [monitoring] that,” Ortega said. “In the meantime, we check in every day to make sure we plug those holes and push the dirt down and then put some traps in there and it’s kind of our plan to maintain that. It’ll be hard to get 100% out of there, but we’re going to do the best to minimize every [risk] and obviously any holes … we’re going to try to correct.”
Ortega said that the grounds issues are less disruptive on the adjacent softball field.
Chandler said that estimated costs for repairs to the outfield range from $7,000 to $10,000, with an additional $5,000 to repair the infield.
“The more you practice, the more you kind of understand the uneven bounces that you get, and I think if anything it’s kind of an advantage for us, because when other teams from Phoenix or Flagstaff come to play on our uneven field, they’re completely lost if we hit it right at them, because the ball bounces, they’re not used to it,” Rahman said. “They’ve got good fields up there, so I think fielding-wise we have an advantage if we can get used to the uneven bounces.”
