WHEELING, W.Va. — Throughout regular season play, the Wheeling Park baseball team quietly kept improving, but stayed somewhat under the radar as other teams in Class AAA Region 1 garnered more statewide attention.
That is, until last week.
The Patriots (13-12), who are going for a third straight state tournament appearance, entered the postseason under .500 overall, matched-up against rival and seventh ranked Brooke. The two teams split a pair of regular season games, but it was Wheeling Park that had the upper hand in the postseason, posting 4-2 and 6-1 sectional wins.
“We have a bunch of seniors who have been at this spot before and, honestly, they just hadn’t played well,” said Wheeling Park coach Mike McLeod. “We’ve had a couple play well here and a couple play well there – our record shows that.”
It’s a Wheeling Park team that is certainly better than that .500 record would initially indicate. The Patriots have been climbing out of a hole all season following a 1-6 start with five straight losses to national competition in Clearwater, Florida.
“We’re trying to find the toughest games out there and our record normally isn’t going to be great. Records don’t matter,” McLeod said. “We licked our wounds coming back, but it made us better. We knew that we weren’t going to face anything that we hadn’t seen.”
Wheeling Park started the year as preseason No. 9 in Class AAA, but fell out of those rankings following the initial start. It was rival Brooke, instead, that spent a majority of the year in the top 10.
“With (Brooke) being so close and knowing what we have in our camp, to see them ranked, yeah, it adds a little bit of fuel to the fire,” McLeod said. “Our best two games of the year were those two sectional games. We pitched well, hit well and all six of our runs (in game two) came with two outs. We finally had timely hits where we could bust a game open.”
The Patriots returned several key pieces from last year’s state semifinal team, but had to replace ace Michael Grove who signed with WVU. Juniors Austin Crebs and Jub Delbrugge have led the way on the mound this season with both picking up sectional wins.
“There are always growing pains,” McLeod said. “There are games that we probably should have won where we let the games get away late in the 6th or 7th inning. We don’t have that shutdown guy this year, but we knew we had a great nucleus.
“When you lose a guy of (Grove’s) caliber, you’re always going to be looking around for the next guy to step up,” he continued. “(Crebs and Delbrugge) both threw seven inning, complete games with minimal damage in sectionals – you can’t ask for any more than that.”
Spencer Rogers, Tyler Cooley, Zane Hummel and Isaac Turner have been a few of the other leaders for the Patriots overall.
“We went down to John Marshall and they beat us 2-1 (on April 25) and we kind of had a ‘Come to Jesus’ talk in the locker room,” McLeod said. “That was the switch for us. We’re playing good baseball right now.”
Wheeling Park will face either Parkersburg or Parkersburg South in the regional semifinals, while No. 8 Morgantown, John Marshall, University and Preston will battle in the other two Region 1 sections.
“We are obviously the hunted coming out of this region (having won two straight regional titles),” McLeod said. “Until someone beats us, I would like to think that we would have as good of a chance as anyone to come out of the region.”