Cardinals red-hot for westerns

The St. Albert Cardinals Red are reaching for the stars at the Best in the West tournament as the provincial midget AA Tier I champions.

“We're at the top of the mountain now and we want to go even further,” said Jason Enright, head coach of the scorching 43-7 Cardinals. “We had a strategy knowing that we were going to be hosting Westerns and we were going to get in automatically but we set our team goal to win provincials and go in as the representative of Alberta. The players have a great positive mindset and they've bought into the process.”

The St. Albert Minor Baseball Association was awarded host rights for the U18 midget, U15 bantam and U13 peewee Western Canada Baseball AA Championships, starting Friday at Legion Memorial Park.

“Weather permitting, it's going to be a great event with a lot of action on all three diamonds. It's going to be an awesome weekend for us as hosts and for those teams coming in,” Enright said. “(Midget AA) is going to be every bit as exciting as it was last weekend when SAMBA hosted the provincial AAA tournament. All the games are going to be competitive. It's a very high-level quality of baseball.”

The midgets will go for the gold against the New Westminster (B.C.) Twins, North East (Sask.) Red Sox, Oak River (Man.) and the Olds Spitfires, who lost Sunday's provincial final 5-4 to the Cardinals in Fort Saskatchewan.

“It's definitely going to be a step up from this past weekend with the overall calibre of play,” said Enright, who reached out to the coach of the Clive Coyotes, last year's Alberta reps at Swift Current who were among three teams to finish 2-2 in the round robin, for a scouting report on Westerns. “We were really competitive with Clive last year. We were one of the few teams to beat them in league play and they went on to win provincials so I have a good idea what to expect.”

There is no shortage of talented midget AA teams throughout Alberta.

“There is no doubt AAA is obviously the cream of the crop, but there are significant teams, ours included, I think on certain days would be able to hold their own against some of those teams in AAA for sure,” Enright said. “There are players out there that would be eligible to play AAA anywhere in the province.”

The Alberta Advantage should favour the Cardinals at westerns.

“We get to play in front of our family and friends so it will be really exciting,” said pitcher/first-baseman Tanner McLean-Poll. “We've just got to keep doing what we've been doing.”

And all the Cardinals do is win.

“We don't really have any weak spots in our lineup. We've all bonded pretty well and we're just a complete team right now,” said McLean-Poll. “We mostly rely on our pitching and defence, that's not saying we can't hit the ball very well but that's what has kept us in a lot of games all year and we just have to keep building on that.”

The Cardinals had their wings clipped twice in exhibition action, once in league play and in four tournaments finished second three times after winning the St. Albert Early Bird. Three of the four losses in tournaments were against AAA teams at the Lethbridge and Kelowna competitions, including both finals.

“We looked for those top-end tournaments to get into so it was a great gauge to know where we're at,” Enright said. “One of my goals when I took over the program at AA (in 2014) was to run it very similar in the capacity that the AAAs run in games and practices. We've obviously increased the number of games as well and I think that's definitely made an improvement to where we're at right now.”

Eight players are back from last year's 28-12-1 team that lost the runs for/against tiebreaker after pool play to make the semifinals at provincials.

“We've obviously had some extremely huge seasons from some of our returning players who are key players on our team,” Enright said. “Our focus and commitment to detail this year was also a lot higher than it was last season, which was fantastic as well. We definitely had a little bit better camaraderie within the group as well and we saw that positive outlook from game in and game out.

“We definitely saw the outcome of all of our hard work and dedication last weekend.”

At provincials, the Cardinals outscored the opposition 36-14 while going 5-0, but the tightest of the bunch was the final against Olds, the No. 8 seed who won the Tier II qualifying bracket to move up into the Tier I tournament.

“I don't think we really expected it to be so close considering how we played against them in the round robin part of provincials (15-4 win), but it was really exciting,” said McLean-Poll, 18.

The third-year midget laced a liner into centrefield with the bases loaded and two out with the score knotted at four in the bottom of the seventh to win the championship.

“It was amazing really. It's really what you dream of no matter what level you play at,” said McLean-Poll, who smoked a fastball to drive home Cole Stasow. “I thought they might have a chance to get it because I remember hearing their coach tell them to play a normal distance in the outfield so I was just thinking drop, drop, drop when it was in the air.”

In the semifinals, McLean-Poll, a southpaw standout, twirled a one-hitter while racking up 11 strikeouts in the 7-1 victory over the Leduc Giants.

“I was just hitting my spots. My two seam was moving quite a bit and I just really kept them off balance,” said the Bellerose Composite High School grad.

McLean-Poll and Mitch King, who allowed only three hits as the starter in the final, anchor the team's pitching rotation.

“In my opinion, we have the two best pitchers in our league on our team so that definitely propelled us to the point where we're at right now,” said Enright, who has also received stellar outings from Mason Libich and Nate Brisson throughout the season. “When you can go into a final game or a semifinal game and you have two horses that can go the distance that's huge.”

FOUL BALLS: The Cardinals picked up two players from outside the association to help fill in with over-agers' Brayden Stasow and Derrick Dahlseide ineligible for westerns because of Baseball Alberta rules.

Quintin Scaber, Landon Christoffel and Tate Clifford were also brought on board from the St. Albert Cardinals Blue team for westerns.