Welcome back to The Deep Post, a reoccurring column-notebook discussing the local sports scene.
This edition will put a wrap on softball and baseball season.
First PitchÂ
Let’s start with Independence’s unlikely run to the Class AA state championship game. Head coach Scott Cuthbert was right about his team exceeding any reasonable expectations. PikeView and Nicholas County were the veteran teams in the region coming into the season. Indy split with both before sweeping them in the postseason en route to the state title game.
With just two seniors, the Patriots made the run to the final Saturday of the season where they came up short against a really good, fundamentally sound Frankfort team.
That wasn’t on my bingo card, mostly because I felt like baseball and softball were at the worst I’ve seen them in the area but that’s a topic for later.
The scorching bats as a well as a few pitching gems powered the run which didn’t end the way the Patriots wanted but showed glimpses of what the future can hold. As noted, the Patriots graduate just two seniors. One of them is transfer Blake Stratton who led the team in batting average and walks, finishing second in categories such as on base percentage and runs batted in.
Brayden Kiblinger, who’s been with the program all four years, is the other senior and leaves a hole at shortstop but the outlook for Independence is optimistic.
But titles aren’t won on outlooks.
The 2021 football team lost in the state championship and rebounded with a title in ’22 but there’s a ton of recent precedent to indicate you can’t hang your hat on potential or prior success.
Head to that boundary on Sullivan Road and ask the Shady district folks about the 2022 and ’23 basketball teams they fielded after winning a title with sophomores in 2021.
An example closer to home would be the 2022 Independence team which was loaded with all-staters. That team mercy-ruled Shady Spring 20-5 in the regular season, beat eventual two-time state champion Logan 12-6 at Logan, boasted a pair of players with eight home runs each, six total players that hit at least one home run and five players with at least 20 runs batted in.
That team never made it out of the section, losing to Shady early in the postseason before falling 8-2 against the same pitcher of record in that 20-5 loss, one that Indy historically had fared well against.
If you were going to pick a state championship favorite, that Independence team was the one that year, and part of that came from their run the year before, one that took them to the state semifinal.
“Yeah, you just got to try to take it one day,” Independence head coach Scott Cuthbert said. “We came back with seven, eight, nine seniors that year. I’m coming back with eight sophomores next year. So I mean, you know, I don’t know if they’ll be quite there yet. So we’ll just have to see. They know they’re gonna have a tough run because we play Greenbrier East and Princeton and we watched (Herbert) Hoover play and stuff. So I mean, our region’s gonna be really stacked next year, so we’ll just have to see what happens when we get there.”
Regardless of how the future unfolds for Indy, what the program accomplished shouldn’t be understated.
The southern part of the state has a poor baseball history.
Since the WVSSAC crowned its first winner, Fairview in 1940, there have been 171 total state champions. The area has only ever produced five baseball state champions in Independence (1990), Peterstown (1989 and ’90), Wyoming East (2012) and Princeton (2012). To further put that into perspective, only 2.9 percent of all baseball state champions crowned have ever come from this part of the state.
Compare that to a sport like basketball where the area has had seven state champions in the last four years across boys and girls basketball.
That’s the kind of history Indpendence battled this year and will battle in the coming years.
Bitter Taste
My belief going into the softball state tournament was that Greenbrier East stood a better chance of winning a softball title than any team the area has produced over the last seven years and it mostly stemmed from the fact East had a pair of a really good pitchers.
Bluefield was really good throughout its lineup and that showed during the state tournament where the Beavers scored 18 runs in 14 innings but defense was an issue and ultimately decided the outcome of a 17-14 loss to Keyser.
Going in I was worried about the Beavers’ reliance on Izzy Smith in the circle and the level of competition they faced throughout the regular season. There were only two pitchers in the area I thought could give the Beavers a look at what they might see at the state tournament and they were Kayla Bartley (Greenbrier East) and Aubrey Smallwood (Beckley).
Whenever they saw Herbert Hoover’s Laila Varney in their elimination game, that’s where it went south for the Beavers. She handcuffed them with her velocity and Bluefield head coach Justin Hall even admitted they hadn’t seen anything like that since a beach trip in early April.
That was part of why I felt good about Greenbrier East. The Spartans traveled and played most of the top teams in Class AA and AAA and I believe that’s part of why they were as productive as they were at the plate.
The two solid pitchers didn’t hurt either.
Most teams only have one pitcher which gives you a thin margin for error. The Spartans had two they felt good about throwing regardless, and for good reason. Lily Carola and Kayla Bartley both had over 80 innings of work and sub-2.20 ERAs.
And for the most part East looked like the best team in Class AAA. But head coach Aaron Ambler said it best immediately after his team squandered a late lead for the second time to end it season.
“We gave two ball games away.”
It came down to defensive miscues.
East led eventual state champion University 9-4 before a pair of errors in the top of the seventh led to its downfall.
The second game against Cabell Midland was more of the same. East jumped out to a 5-0 lead, led 5-2 with two outs in the sixth and proceeded to surrender five straight runs.
It was unfortunate because I left South Charleston believing East was probably the best triple-A team there but didn’t execute on defense when it mattered. The bats were on, the pitching was more than good enough to win a pair of games but at the highest level the margin for error is razor thin and often nonexistent.
The deterioration of baseball and softball cultureÂ
The culture around baseball and softball is the worst among all sports and it keeps deteriorating. Little League has mandatory play rules and many fans seem to think those rules carry through to upper levels. My experience has been that about 90 percent of softball and baseball parents and fans contribute to the toxicity of the two sports. There’s a good 10 percent I hold in high regard but that’s a small number.
There were complaints about umpires all year long when we’re already facing an umpire shortage with the National Federation of State High School Associations reporting losses of 20,000 umpires at the high school level between 2018 and 2022.
There were even games in the area this year where umpires had to be escorted off of school property following games for their own safety.
It was a rarity to see more than two umpires at a game and I’ve even seen one where there was just a home plate umpire.
It’s just one symptom of the problem. When more experienced umpires are calling it quits because the hassle isn’t worth it and you end up with less-experienced umpires, you’re probably going to lose efficiency.
But this isn’t just about umpires, it’s about the sense of entitlement. This happens in all sports but I had numerous coaches tell me they spent more time dealing with unhappy parents than actually coaching. And sure, coaches aren’t always right but it’s their call to make.
I went to Concord with a softball player named Allie Reid. She was the coach at Chatham High School in Virginia until announcing her resignation a little over a week ago in a post that’s gone viral on social media. In the post she described the abusive behavior she’s endured from parents. She’s been attacked in parking lots by parents, screamed at by parents at practices and has been bashed repeatedly on social media.
Her will to coach was crushed before the age of 30.
You’re going to disagree with a decision, a ball or strike call, etc. but it doesn’t need to escalate. And if it does escalate, do you think that’s going to change an umpire or coach’s mind?
I don’t know if there’s a fix for the problem and I’d wager there probably isn’t as it’s too deep rooted at this point to flush out entirely.
In a related note all-state teams release this week for softball. I’m sure they’ll be universally agreed upon.