The St. Albert Cardinals are exceeding expectations with a winning season in midget AAA baseball.
The Red Birds rank among the top teams in the Norwest league at 12-2 while going 17-6-2 overall.
“We’re doing a lot better than we thought we were going to do,” said centrefielder Anthony Owen, one of 10 Cardinals on the roster from last year’s silver medallists at the Baseball Alberta Tier 1 and U18 Western Canada championships.
“Looking at the roster at the start of the year no one expected us to do this good because we lost a lot of key players last year, like our whole infield,” added Danny Tkachyk, a returning catcher. “We’ve come a long ways since the start of tryouts. We’ve had a couple of bad games but so far we seem to be doing pretty good.”
The Cardinals have unfinished business after last year’s 24-13 showing in league, provincials and westerns.
“After losing in both of those finals we’ve come for blood. We want it really bad and we’re going to take it,” Tkachyk said. “Our younger guys have been there for us, they’re pretty good, and our older guys have shown up to play a lot so that’s been pretty key too.”
The Cardinals are tough to track down when leading.
“When we get ahead it’s not like we take a break. We keep pouring it on more and more and just try and bury them and don’t let them get back into the game,” Owen said. “We’ve executed when we had to but then sometimes we just get lazy and that’s what happens when we lose. We just kind of slough it off a bit.”
Tuesday’s 5-4 loss to the Sherwood Park Athletics (8-9) wasn’t a typical performance by the Cardinals.
“We started off strong. We got up 4-1 (in the top of the fourth) and then we just kind of got lazy and didn’t try as hard. They scraped some runs together and we made a couple of errors and they capitalized on it and then we just couldn’t make any plays or hit at all after that,” said Owen of the walk-off win by the A’s with one run on three hits with one out in the seventh at Sherwood Park.
The second Norwest loss in a row was also the first game for the Cardinals after last weekend’s 2-2-1 tournament result in Langley.
“We beat some pretty good teams and we had some really good games against a couple of teams,” Owen said. “We started off a little bit slow, just the first game or two, and then once we adjusted to the faster pitching and the better pitching we did pretty good. I think a lot of the guys realized what it’s like to face some good pitching.”
The Cardinals and Abbotsford played to a 3-3 draw, followed by the 11-2 loss to North Shore and wins of 6-3 against the Victoria Mariners and 9-3 against the Victoria Eagles before dropping a 2-1 decision to Okotoks Black.
“One of our first years, Tom (Leathem), hasn’t started a game since bantam and he came in and pounded the zone. He came in with a commanding fastball, his curveball was working and he shut those guys down the whole game,” Tkachyk said of the win against the Eagles.
The last game before the tournament was the 6-0 loss to the Parkland Twins (12-1) in Spruce Grove as Josh Fisher struck-out 14 Cardinals and hit one batter without surrendering a hit in the seven-inning affair. The Cardinals also committed five errors.
“We just hadn’t really seen a guy that can throw a curveball and a fastball at the same time because a lot of guys can only spot up one pitch but that guy threw decently hard and he threw a lot of curveballs. He caught a lot of us off guard,” Owen said.
Tylor Jans is one of the most dangerous Cardinals at the plate with .478 average, second best in the league, and team-high 11 RBIs.
Conor Bronson (.364) leads the Cardinals in hits with 12 and in triples with two.
Jans, Owen and Tkachyk (.355) have 11 hits apiece and over-ager Erik Sabrowski (.348) belted two homers, drove home 10 runs and collected 10 hits in 28 plate appearances before joining the Edmonton Prospects in the Western Major Baseball League.
The Cardinals have scored 95 runs – led by Zach Froment’s 13 and Damien Obrigewitch’s 12 – in 14 games, fourth best in the 14-team circuit.
“Our order is doing pretty good and some of the first year guys are stepping up a bit and doing pretty well for us,” Owen said. “We’re doing our jobs and scoring runs when we have men in scoring position.”
Owen, 17, a third-year midget AAA Cardinal who also catches, is second in stolen bases with 13 in league play and is batting .297 with six RBIs and 10 runs scored.
“My hitting has got a lot better. My approach is always good and I’m always ready. I always want to get us started because I’m the leadoff guy. I just want to find a way to make things happen out there because I’ve got some speed,” said the Grade 12 Bellerose Composite High School student.
Dylan Gates (2-0, 14 strikeouts in 17 innings), Ross Supruniuk (2-0, six strikeouts in 13.1 innings), Spencer Dronkelaar (1-1, one save, 11 strikeouts in 15 innings), Froment (1-0, eight strikeouts in 17 innings) and Jans (1-0, five strikeouts in 10 innings) have stood tall on the mound as the Cardinals have allowed 46 runs, the fourth-lowest total in the league.
“Our pitchers, especially the younger guys, have done really well for us and our older guys have been pretty clutch and coming through for us,” said Tkachyk, 17, a Grade 11 Paul Kane High School student. “Most of our guys have been going pretty much the whole game. They’ve been spotting up if their curveball works, their changeup works and their fastball is in command. They’re just getting ahead in the count and it helps and not many walks either and we’ve got to keep that going.”
Wednesday the Cardinals host Parkland at 7 p.m. at Legion Memorial Park.
