By BRAD KEITH
TheFlashToday.com
STEPHENVILLE (June 1, 2017) — What does an increase of seven wins – technically a 6.5 game improvement – mean anyway?
Over the course of 34 total games including three tournaments and six playoff contests scattered over three weeks, it means a lot.
In the case of the 2017 Stephenville baseball team, it meant a 30.4 percent increase in wins with a 40 percent decrease in losses. A little technical, sure, but it meant the Yellow Jackets posted their best record since the UIL stepped in four years ago and reduced the number of games allowed in the regular season.
It meant Stephenville advance past the second round of the Region I-4A playoffs for the first time since 2014, and it provided head coach Justin Swenson the opportunity to enjoy his first area-round win as a head coach after helping his brother and former boss Michael Swenson make deep playoff runs look routine during a dominant stretch at Iowa Park that included a 2014 state tournament appearance.
It means the team improved vastly in a number of different facets on the diamond, most notably getting onto the basepaths via base hits or any means necessary.
Stephenville didn’t just make its 6.5 game improvement and jaunt to the Region I-4A quarterfinals by mistake. Teams don’t jump out to big early leads in four consecutive playoff games then hold off desperate late rallies by opponents battling for their post season lives by mistake.
To put it in simple terms, you don’t go from one game over .500 to 14 games over the even mark by mistake. It’s a numbers game, and there a slew of numbers that combine to show just how far Stephenville as come since the beginning of the 2016 season, when Swenson was a rookie head coach and the Jackets were retooling a roster depleted by graduation.
So what improved? Most notably, hitting.
The Yellow Jackets improved from a .222 batting average in 2016 to a .283 average in 2017. That’s 61 points, or 27.5 percent better from the dish. And it’s actually better than that when you consider on-base percentage, which soared 91 points from .304 to .395, which equates to a 29.5 percent improvement.
And then there was the pitching staff, which kept the team in some games and drove the bus to victory lane in others, turning in a cumulative earned run average of just 2.10, led by 8-4A district pitcher of the year Easton Jones with a 0.88 ERA and 87 strikeouts, and Caleb Gibbons, a southpaw with a nasty curve that made him deserving of first-team all-district honors regardless how much talent fills the rosters of 8-4A teams.
It also means there is a winning culture surrounding the team, pushing them to be their best and to then get better anyway. No one can argue that isn’t present at SHS after a spring semester that saw individuals and teams account for numerous UIL academic and athletics state championships. There was the Honeybee soccer team winning its first state title, Blake Aragon soaring to high jump gold at the UIL Track & Field State Meet, an ag group that proved to be the best in Texas and even a theatrical design team that captured the first 4A state title in the new event,. Gibbons was a big part of that, winning a state championship individually in marketing.
But specifically on the baseball field, it means the Swenson way is becoming the Yellow Jacket way, and after it took a year to engulf the program, it appears to be the right way for traveling toward continued success.
But so many improvements and still the Jackets could not match the 2013 team’s run to the Region I-4A championship series in 2013. So what are the next steps?
Swenson believes he knows the answer, and it begins with being stronger at the plate and more consistent in the field. That’s so simple it’s almost cliche, but oftentimes it’s the simple answer that is the correct one.
“A .283 batting average isn’t bad as a team, but .283 doesn’t beat Wylie or Godley,” Swenson said “Everything in this region is going through those two teams lately, so they’re the ones to beat.”
There’s also a matter of what is accomplished with those hits. Singles comprised a whopping 203 of 237 total hits by Stephenville. That’s 85.7 percent of the team’s hits accounting for just one base. The Jackets hit exactly one home run in 2017, while reigning 4A state champ and now back-to-back Region I-4A champ Abilene Wylie entered its regional final series with 25 home runs and had enough juice in the tank to score 12 runs over two games to sweep a Godley team that held Stephenville to just one total run in the regional quarterfinals two weeks early and limited the Yellow Jackets to just five runs in four meetings, all won by Godley.
“It’s not that 237 hits isn’t god because it is,” he told his team with their families listening in before they closed the book on 2017 with a team trip to watch the Texas Rangers. “But we need more of those hits to be doubles, triples or even home runs.”
Then there is the matter of fielding the ball. A .909 fielding percentage sounds high, but it means the Jackets commit an error for roughly every 10th ball put in play. That led to opponents scoring 51 unearned runs in 2017, 78.5 percent of the total runs (116) they earned.
On paper, it appears Stephenville already has the tools in place for more improvement next year. The return of Jones to lead the pitching staff is big, and so is welcoming back Cody Storrs, a .390 hitter who went 8-for-15 in the first four playoff games this spring. Short stop Derek Gifford will anchor the infield again and hit above .300, as did designated hitter Trevor Easter, who finished the year at designated hitter but also gained experience at catcher.
The only other hitter above the .300 mark was Aaron Abila, who along with Caleb Gibbons will be the toughest pieces to replace. That list also includes centerfielder Seth Heupel, a signee with Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, and Luke Bullard, second-team all-district as a pitcher working primarily in relief.
Stephenville improved in many areas in 2017, the results prove as much. If the Jackets can continue that upward trend, there will be many more exciting campaigns and playoff runs ahead.
“We had a good season, our record indicates that,” said Swenson. “But we aren’t happy being good, we want to take the next steps toward being great. We’re getting there, but we’re not there yet.”
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