Sunday’s season debut for the St. Albert Cardinals in Okotoks will mark the first time the bantam AAA team has played baseball outdoors this season.
Game times are 10 a.m. against the Okotoks Dawgs Red and 1 p.m. against the Spruce Grove White Sox.
“We’ve done a little bit of work indoors but it’s obviously not the same,” said Dave Maguire, the 2012 Baseball Alberta Ted Rudd Coach of the Year Award winner. “Everybody else except for Okotoks is the same position. The Calgary weather hasn’t been very much better than here, but they’ve got a fieldhouse that they can work in. We do what we have to do with what we’ve been given and Spruce Grove I guess will be in the same boat as us. They will have had as much or as little practice time as us.”
The Cardinals have six games on tap in 18 days in the round one developmental portion of the performance Tier 1 schedule.
“This year in particular will truly be developmental,” Maguire said of the late spring.
The Cardinals finalized their roster recently after a series of player evaluations.
“Certainly getting outside is a benefit,” Maguire said of assembling a team. “But there is lots of off-field training that has to happen to begin with because you have to build a base so everybody is understanding what your system is.”
Dylan Gates is the only player back from last year’s 39-12 Cardinals, third-place finishers at provincials and semifinalists at westerns with a line-up of seven returning players from the team’s 22-12 performance in 2011.
Gates is a pitcher who played in the outfield last year and during the winter worked on his skills at first base.
“He definitely will be one of the best left-handed pitchers in the province,” Maguire said.
The Cardinals are carrying two more players than last year for extra pitching depth. Six of the 14 players are first-year bantams.
“The first part of the season is certainly going to be different because we do have so many new kids on the block, but the bar still gets raised, whether it’s the first time they’ve played for us or they’re returning. The bar gets raised all the time as we go through the season,” Maguire said. “We will be competitive during the season and we will be competitive come provincials because we’ve got good athletes. If there is one thing that I’ve learned over the years is that if you’ve got the good athletes and you give them a good structured program you’re going to see the results.”
Last year the Cardinals played 51 games and had 44 practice days.
“It’s a fulltime job for the boys and they all have a passion for the game or they wouldn’t be doing that,” Maguire said. “One of our challenges and one of our focuses is to prepare the graduating bantams for success at the midget level. We have six of our boys that graduated that made midget AAA this year so I’m pretty excited for them.”
The Cardinals historically have been one of the top teams in the bantam AAA circuit.
“It is for the most part a very competitive league. Some teams are traditionally very strong competitors and year in and year out we’ll have teams that you know are going to be there and we’ve got to keep the focus and keep the intensity going. You can’t take a day off, regardless who your competition is. Every team has one or two bantam AAA calibre pitchers that can easily on any given day shut you down if you’re not on your game,” said Maguire, a longtime St. Albert Minor Baseball Association coach who has served as the bantam AAA dugout boss the last few years.
The home opener for the Cardinals is May 8 against Sherwood Park at 6:30 p.m. at Legion Memorial Park.
