A season of ups and downs

Calvert American Legion baseball had a streaky campaign

Friday, Aug. 1, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Photo by DEE MCINTOSH Calvert American Legion’s Eric Gronbeck was solid both in the field and on the pitching mound. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story Click here to enlarge this photo File photo by DARWIN WEIGEL Calvert American pitcher Matt Beck, a 2008 Huntingtown High School graduate, allowed two hits over five innings in a 4-3 win over Mayo on July 16.   A rollercoaster-like season May 31: Calvert 7, Laurel 4 June 1: Calvert 8, Bethesda 3 June 3: Chaney 6, Calvert 1 June 10: Calvert 11, Bowie 3 June 12: Clinton 5, Calvert 2 June 14: Calvert 5, Wheaton 2 June 17: Calvert 4, La Plata 3 (8) June 18: Calvert 7, Bowie 1 June 19: Calvert 4, Chaney 1 June 21: Gaithersburg 10, Calvert 2 June 22: Gaithersburg 11, Calvert 0 June 22: Calvert 5, Damascus 4 June 25: Calvert 10, St. Mary’s 5 June 28: Calvert 7, Sandy Spring 4 July 1: Calvert 8, Clinton 1 July 2: Calvert 5, St. Mary’s 1 July 4: P.G. Stars 10, Calvert 2 July 4: Calvert 15, P.G. Stars 0 July 6: Heat 2, Calvert 0 July 6: Calvert 10, Md. Royals 2 July 8: La Plata 14, Calvert 3 July 9: Chaney 15, Calvert 6 July 10: St. Mary’s 5, Calvert 1 July 12: C-Saxon 14, Calvert 2 July 13: Clinton 4, Calvert 3 July 13: Calvert 15, Bowie 1 July 16: Calvert 4, Mayo 3 July 17: Calvert 5, La Plata 3 July 22: Calvert 13, Pasadena 5

The middle of the season? Not so much.

Calvert Posts 85, 206, 220 and 274 won 12 of its first 16 games and concluded the 2008 season with four straight wins. Though a 2-7 stretch midway through the year muddied the team’s stellar start, Calvert still finished in second place in the Frank Riley League, behind Chaney.

All of which made first-year Coach Tom Sydnor very pleased with his team’s 17-11 overall record. Calvert was 4-0 in the season in one-run games and won five of eight games against Southern Maryland-based teams St. Mary’s, Chaney and La Plata.

‘‘Oh yes, definitely,” said Sydnor, who was an assistant to Jimmy Payne the previous couple years. ‘‘If I didn’t enjoy this I wouldn’t do it. Hopefully the kids learned something and I also learned something.”

‘‘We started out strong and kind of went downhill, but it was good overall for me,” said Calvert second baseman Jesse Reid, who will attend West Virginia University in the fall and who may walk on the baseball team. ‘‘I played with some older kids and some college kids, so now I know what [university’s] going to be like.”

Calvert catcher⁄outfielder Nick Sydnor said the 2008 version of the Legion team was Jekyl and Hyde-like.

‘‘I think we competed against some of the best teams in the league but also lost to some of the worst,” said Sydnor, who is a rising sophomore at Stevenson University and who will be too old to return to the team next year. ‘‘It depended on which team showed up.”

The team that showed up at the beginning of the season was virtually unbeatable. Calvert opened the season with back-to-back wins over Laurel (7-4) and Bethesda (8-3).

Tom Sydnor said the fast start was calming after losing some key pitchers and hitters last season.

‘‘I don’t think I had any right to believe we’d start 12-4 after the team we had last year,” he said. ‘‘I was pretty worried [this year].”

Sydnor said the excitement was partly the reason for the torrid pace set by his club.

‘‘I had everybody pushing and excited about [the season],” he said, ‘‘and the energy carried through into wins. We also had pretty good pitching and we made plays when we needed them and we got some breaks.”

Among those wins was a 4-3 victory June 17 over powerhouse La Plata, which placed second in the recent NABF regional tournament. In that game, Sydnor singled home the winning run in the bottom of the eighth inning.

‘‘We didn’t out-hit other people,” Sydnor said, referring to the 5.86 runs per game the team scored during its 16-game span. ‘‘But the hits we did get were timely.”

But at the Bowie tournament, which began July 4, Calvert’s fortunes started to turn around drastically.

After splitting two of four games at the tournament, Calvert dropped five straight and was outscored 52-15.

‘‘I didn’t see it coming, but I also don’t think I was surprised,” Sydnor said of his team’s about face. ‘‘The kids had a full high school season and then Legion. Were they burnt out? Could be. We also had some people not show up the second half of the season and others discover [summer] baseball is not as important as they thought it was.”

Part of the reason the team went south, Sydnor believes, was the grueling schedule. Including the tournament, Calvert played 10 games in 10 days.

‘‘A lot of kids who hadn’t played Legion ball before weren’t used to the intensity of the schedule,” he said. ‘‘There’s a lot of teams that couldn’t handle that [schedule].”

But Calvert bounced back and finished the season with four straight wins.

‘‘They finally started doing what we had preached for them to do all along,” Sydnor said, ‘‘which was to be more patient at the plate. We were giving pitchers a chance.”

Because of its second-place league finish, Calvert was invited to the runner-up tournament but declined to attend because of a lack of pitchers.

‘‘I’m definitely disappointed with our team,” Nick Sydnor said. ‘‘ How we started, we definitely should have been able to make the state [playoffs]. Or at least did better than we did.

‘‘I think the overall surprise was that we had a lot of young kids who were playing at that level for the first time and they handled themselves pretty well,” said Sydnor, who gave the season a B+ rating. ‘‘I think everybody gave me what they were capable of. The younger guys had games where they were above their heads and they had games where they were still learning.”