Trending
The sun was beginning to peak through the clouds and illuminate Bowman Field once again Monday. A quick-passing shower had watered down a dry infield and it looked as if the Williamsport Crosscutters and State College Spikes would be able to complete the final half-inning of the New York-Penn League season.
Then the heavens opened one more time dousing the 93-year-old ballpark. And just like that, a summer of baseball came to an end. Fittingly for this weird roller-coaster season, the Cutters and Spikes finished tied, 3-3. Nobody seemed to mind Williamsport didn't get its final chance to bat and maybe win the game. Everybody was just ready to go home.
Right fielder Hunter Hearn was loading up his pickup truck preparing to make the 18-hour drive back to Texas overnight. Others made flight arrangements. Kendall Simmons wondered what he was going to do with the trophy he received earlier in the day for being the team's player of the year when he went through airport security.
"It's a goofy way to end, but it's fitting," said first baseman Rudy Rott after a 2-for-4 performance.
This season was far from a storybook for the Crosscutters. Only two teams in the franchise's 21 seasons have won fewer games than this Cutters team. But that number is skewed by a 10-27 start to the season which defied all logic. It was a team run by Murphy's Law where everything which could go wrong, found a way to go wrong.
Then there was the final 39 games of the season. The Cutters' 22-16-1 record over that stretch was the second-best mark in the league over the final 39 games behind only playoff-bound Brooklyn and Hudson Valley who were both 22-16 (each team had one canceled game).
This season was a story about perseverance. Manager Pat Borders found reasons to be positive when the results were more than often not. He and the coaching staff found ways to keep a team floundering in the cellar of the league motivated each afternoon they came to work.
In his fifth season leading Williamsport, Borders grew as much as the players over the course of the last 2 1/2 months. Finding ways to be positive was difficult, but he helped a team devoid of much to be happy about for the first half of the season, and helped them turn into one of the toughest matchups over the second half of the season.
"I feel like they improved, which is the ultimate goal," Borders said. "You want to win because it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. But who remembers how many games you won? You remember if a guy plays well and then gets to the big leagues. You remember a guy who gets to double-A when you didn't think he'd get that high. You want to teach them how to win, but the brass ring is to get them to the big leagues and get them as good as you can as fast as you can."
The positive improvement is easy to see in the team's record over the last month and a half. It's a little harder to see on an individual basis, but Juan Aparicio finished with a team-record .373 batting average before being called up to Lakewood. Simmons' 12 home runs tied him with Cody Overbeck for the third-most in team history. Corbin Williams became one of just five players in franchise history to steal 30 bases in a season.
But even beyond those brilliant statistical accomplishments, seven players raised their batting averages at least 65 points from their low water marks during the season. Jake Holmes went 26 for 76 (.342) over the final month of the season to raise his season average by 104 points. Rott raised his average 96 points, Logan O'Hoppe bumped his up 89 points.
So even with the final numbers which don't look impressive on the surface, the progress they show with more in-depth inspection shows Borders got exactly what he wanted out of the season: improving players. Rott scored Williamsport's first run yesterday after reaching on a one-out single in the second. He drove in the Cutters' second run with a one-out RBI single in the third.
"The way we finished says something about every guy in this locker room and every guy in this organization as a whole because nobody gave up on us," Rott said. "They were pushing us to stay positive and to be better because they knew we were better than what we were when the season started."
"I've never lost like we did in the beginning of the season, so you learn how to manage yourself and find positives in every game and point out the things they need to improve on," Borders said. "But the main thing is to stay positive so the energy is good. You can lose a team fairly quick and then they don't get better."
But this was a team who never gave in to that urge to give up. Even at 10-27 when the outlook for the season was already bleak, it was a group which consistently worked hard, knowing they were so close to turning things around. Then they won 10 out of 12 games to prove the work was worth it and all of a sudden the Cutters were playing the kind of baseball they knew was possible.
And Monday, they were able to walk out of Bowman Field, most for the final time ever, knowing they were better than when they arrived. And regardless of how many wins the league standings said they had, that was the ultimate goal.
"This team has grown together a lot and I think how we finished had a lot to do with it," Rott said. "We all grew together and we gained confidence through out teammates' successes, and ultimately it led to guys seeing more success as the season went on."