Park Baseball Building Experience, Consistency

Story and photos by Colin Murphy

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The key for the Severna Park baseball team in 2019 is going to be establishing consistency.

With plenty of talent on the roster, the Falcons are off to a 3-2 start with wins over St. Mary’s and Centennial, but they went just 1-2 in three county games during the final week of March, sandwiching losses to Broadneck and South River around a win over Arundel.

Severna Park’s latest effort on March 29 came in a loss against a visiting South River team that got out to an early lead and kept the Falcon lineup in check for a 3-1 win.

The Seahawks scored two runs in the third inning and another in the fourth to go up 3-0. Corey Bodnar hit an RBI double in the fifth inning to pull the Falcons to within 3-1, but Severna Park couldn’t mount any further rallies against the exceptional pitching of South River’s Kavi Caster, who pitched 6.2 innings on 106 pitches, allowing only three hits and striking out 12 to earn the win.

“We need to get better in all facets of the game,” said Severna Park head coach Eric Milton. “In the loss against Broadneck, we didn’t hit. Then against Arundel, we hit but we didn’t play defense. Today we didn’t hit again. We pitched OK, but the pitching wasn’t where we wanted it to be. We just need to clean everything up and work at all three areas.”

In the loss to Broadneck, Matt Isaac drove in two runs for the Bruins, and Nick Gatton pitched a complete-game shutout victory with eight strikeouts and only three hits as Broadneck won, 3-0, on March 26.

But Severna Park rebounded forcefully. The Falcons exploded for 13 runs on 12 hits in a 13-3 win over Arundel on March 27. Junior Brendan Simonds belted a three-run homer to deep right field in the second inning, spotting Severna Park to a 7-0 lead. Jacob Way was 3-for-3 with a walk and scored three runs, while Camden Handwerger had two doubles and scored twice and Parker Jones had a two-RBI double. Mark Sasse had two hits and an RBI and scored, Jordan Hallet had an RBI single, and Josh Horgan had a single and scored three times.

Evan Lewis was the winning pitcher for Severna Park against Arundel, striking out eight and getting his second win of the season (St. Mary’s); Lewis came on strong in the second half of last season and has early claim as the team’s ace. Lewis, Simonds, Handwerger, Jones, Way, Wes Adams, Logan Harris, Logan Hamer and Michael Isakov make up Severna Park’s pitching battery; Adams and Harris pitched decently against South River, while Simonds struck out eight batters against Broadneck.

Against South River, Bodnar and Hallet made sensational diving catches in the outfield, but the bats weren’t there to complement the workable pitching and defense. Simonds said the team needs to replicate its offensive energy from the win over Arundel, something it failed to do against South River.

“Offensively, we’ve got to come out of the gate, get up in the dugout, get up in the field,” he said. “At Arundel we were up, we were vocal, we were going into it just confident in everything we did. [Against South River] we came out and we were sluggish, and that’s what you get when you come out like that.”

Handwerger is among a large segment of the team stepping into starting and/or prominent roles following the graduation of many of last year’s players. While the team is relatively inexperienced in this regard, Handwerger said the players are hungry and ready to contribute.

“Definitely getting to watch last year and see how everything works gives us a better idea of how we need to approach the games and how we need to be focused and locked in every game,” said Handwerger.

The Falcons have runway for growth over the next two months and the ability to make it happen, and Milton said it’s all going to show in how much they want it.

“I think we could get a lot better,” he said. “A lot of it is going to be mentality and work ethic, little things like that. If they work at it and they want to work at it and they want to get better, they can get a lot better. But, it’s teaching them how to do that.”

Simonds believes the team will be right back at the top of the conversation by late May.

“In my mind, we can make another run,” he said. “As long as we push each other, we can do anything we want, because this county’s for the taking right now.”

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