It may not have been the smoothest start to the Intercounty Baseball League season for the Barrie Baycats, but manager Angus Roy maintains his club is in perfect position to capture a third straight league title.
Proof positive was offered this week, when the Baycats threw the proverbial monkey off their backs Tuesday night with a 5-0 victory at Coates Stadium over the Kitchener Panthers. It was their first victory in five tries against Kitchener, knocking last-year’s runners-up out of first place.
“We got great starting pitching and defense,” Roy says of the whitewashing. “Our organization has always been about pitching and defense and if you look at (Tuesday) night compared to the other games against Kitchener this year, we just had a better mound performance and we were clean defensively.”
Pitcher Emelis Guerrero, scattered three hits in his Barrie debut, and his manager says, “He pounded the strike zone with three different pitches. When you do that if gives you a better chance to be successful. He was very calm on the mound as well, and I liked how he handled himself in his first start in the IBL and Canada, for that matter.”
The Baycats now sit in third spot with a 14-7 record, two and a half games behind the new leaders from London. Roy attributes that to a solid roster, many of them holdovers from the two championship years.
“You get spoiled watching guys like (Ryan) Spataro, (Jordan) Castaldo, (Kevin) Atkinson, (Kyle) DeGrace, etc, play night in and night out. They do exceptional things on a regular basis.
Roy, a former pitcher himself, singles out young reliever Jaspreet Shergill, something of an unknown quantity, who has “given us another bullpen weapon to throw towards our back end and it has made our bullpen very deep.”
Meantime, the IBL holds its All-Star Game this Saturday at 2 p.m. at Coates Stadium, with the league’s best taking on the Canadian national junior team. The Baycats then swing back into action Sunday afternoon against the league-leading Majors in London, before returning home Thursday, July 7 against Toronto.
Roy says the team is just getting better every single outing, and is confident of a “threepeat” once the post-season is over.
“We want to be playing our best baseball heading into August. And, like I’ve said many times, I will take our 25 against anybody’s in a seven-game series regardless of where we finish in the standings.”
