Johnsonville baseball eyeing another deep run

JOHNSONVILLE — With a warm April sun beating down on the Johnsonville High School baseball field, there’s a serious practice session unfolding.

There’s plenty of chatter, hustle and sweat.

But there are also a few jokes being cracked, and when an errant throw sends a pitcher diving to the ground in obvious concern for his physical well-being, the team erupts in laughter.

“One thing for sure, they’re having a lot of fun,” Flashes coach Scott Cook said.

Of course, what’s not to have fun with this year?

The Flashes, ranked second in the state among Class A squads in the latest coaches’ poll, are 24-2 after Tuesday night’s 15-0 first-round playoff win over Timmonsville, and they’ve looked every bit like a team destined for its third straight trip to the lower state finals.

It’s no secret that’s what the Flashes are striving for, and not just because of that ages-old desire to win. Losing in the final round of the lower state playoffs each of the prior two seasons to Bamberg-Ehrhardt hasn’t sat well with Johnsonville. The Flashes don’t want to get ahead of themselves, but they’re also not shy about what they hope to see in a couple of weeks: another meeting with the top-ranked Raiders with a trip to the state championship series on the line.

“That’s who we’re looking for,” junior shortstop Taylor Strickland said.

First things first. Johnsonville has to get out of the district level and into the lower state bracket for that to happen.

But if the regular season and Thursday night are any indication, a third straight meeting between the teams might not be only possible, but likely.

It has been such since the season began. The Flashes lost in the fourth game of the season to Lake City and again in the 20th to Newburgh (N.Y.) in a spring break tournament at Myrtle Beach.

There are numerous statistics that show how the Flashes rolled through the regular season with only the two losses.

There is a team batting average of .390, an on-base percentage of .478, a team ERA of just a smidgen over 4 and a leadoff batter who hasn’t struck out in more than 80 plate appearances this season.

That’s the how.

The why is something much less tangible, according to Cook and his players.

Yet it’s as old as the game itself when it comes to defining the components of success.

“It’s the attitude of the boys. It’s the will. They want it,” Cook sad. “We’ve got 19 or 20 17- or 18-year-old boys who just want it. They’ve been together since the eighth or ninth grade.”

It shows, the players say, in how they play the game.

The element of trust is pervasive, and it has to be.

Cook doesn’t have what he calls an overpowering pitcher on his staff, so his hurlers are constantly relying on their defense to make plays behind them.

It’s something to which Johnsonville’s top starter, senior Tracy Bishop, can attest.

“I just go up there and throw it and let the guys behind me do the work,” said Bishop, who is 5-0 record with a 1.41 ERA. “I don’t really think of myself as an ace. I can throw it across the plate and these guys behind me can make plays all day.”

The ERAs of other pitchers don’t sparkle like Bishop’s, but the results have been similar. Senior left-hander Brock Cooper (4.01 ERA) is now 6-0 after winning Thursday, and junior Tyler Tanner (5.75) suffered one of the Flashes’ two losses.

But when an offense is pushing more than 11 runs across the plate per game on average, it makes any ERA that looks slightly inflated almost irrelevant. After beating Timmonsville, the Flashes have outscored opponents 300-82.

The catalyst for that offense has been Strickland, who bats leadoff and has not failed to either get on base or put the ball in play all season.

As a team, the Flashes had struck out 103 times going into Thursday, a tad more than four times a game.

There might be a couple of reasons for that.

For one, Cook said his team takes a lot of pride in its hitting and spends a lot of time in the cage working on it.

Then there’s Cook’s strikeout policy.

“We have a rule that if you strike out twice (in a game) you don’t strike out the third time because you don’t bat the third time,” Cook said.

Fear of not playing, Strickland admitted, can be a great motivator.

“(Striking out) is just the one thing I don’t want to do in a game,” he said.

And that feeds into another element of the Flashes’ success, according to Cook.

“We’ve had a lot of production off our bench,” he said. “There’s a lot of competition among themselves out here. They know if they don’t produce there’s someone who probably will.”

It has added up to a season that started good and got better for the Flashes.

Cook has coached baseball long enough to know that the law of averages catch up to any team, not matter how good it might be, if it plays enough games.

He’s hoping that doesn’t come into play this season.

“I’ve been wondering if it’s going to level off,” he said. “But these boys are on a mission. They may come up short and it would hurt me to see the pain in their eyes and the disappointment. But they know what they want.”