One of the keys to a great season is getting off to a great start, and that’s something the North Central College baseball team did to open their 2014 campaign. The Cardinals started the season 13-6 overall and 5-2 in CCIW play.
But as the weather has started to warm up, NCC has cooled off. The Cardinals have lost four of their last five games, dropping from second in the conference to now even with Carthage for the fourth and final spot in the CCIW tournament with a conference record of 6-6.
While things have not been going North Central’s way over the past couple of weeks, Cardinals junior third baseman Sam Klein says the team is still confident they can weather this storm and make a run down the stretch.
“We have a great group of guys that are hungry and come to play every game,” says Klein. “Lately we haven’t executed as much as we would like.”
[soundcloud params=”auto_play=true&show_comments=true&color=0ac4ff”]https://soundcloud.com/ncclinked/sam-klein-interview[/soundcloud]Slow finishes have plagued this Cardinal program over the past two seasons. After a conference championship in 2010 and another conference tournament birth in 2011, NCC has failed to make the postseason in the last two years.
In 2012 North Central put themselves in excellent position to not only qualify for the CCIW tournament but have a favorable seed, however, the Cardinals lost their last six conference games to miss out on the postseason entirely.
Last season the Cardinals dug themselves a hole in conference play that they couldn’t escape. At one point NCC had a streak where they fell in seven of nine CCIW contests and finished one game out of the conference tournament after falling to Elmhurst 7-6 in the final game of the regular season.
With these bad losing streaks resulting in an early summer for the North Central baseball team in each of the past two seasons, Klein says he and the rest of the team are hungrier than ever to extend their season past early May.
“We like working at it,” explains Klein. “We like coming in early to practice and spending time after practice. We have a lot of guys that want this.”
Looking at this season’s squad so far, the team’s pitching has been their strong point. The Cardinals top three starters; senior Kris Singh, sophomore Andrew Houser, and junior Ben Krusen each have an earned run average below four. Singh ranks among the top five in the CCIW in ERA (1.95) and is tied for the conference lead with 49 strikeouts.
Coming out of the bullpen, sophomores Jordan Van Dyck and Bryan Polowy have been excellent in relief as well. Each have a strikeout to walk ratio of over two so far this season. As a staff, NCC is holding opposing offenses to a batting average of only .286.
“We know we’re not going to hit well every inning or every game so it definitely helps that we have pitching to back it up,” says Klein. “It’s definitely a huge bonus for us.”
North Central has also been impressive at the plate. With seven players hitting over .300 and an eighth at .299, the Cardinals have a team batting average of .306.
Individually, Klein leads the way hitting .409 so far and is one of only seven players in the conference to be over the .400 mark at this point in the season.
With plenty of baseball left, Klein says that if the Cardinals can do one particular thing offensively, they’ll have a good chance down the stretch.
“We’re just going to stick to our approach and stay within ourselves,” explains Klein. “We’re just focused on doing what we need to do to score runs, and that’s getting on base, moving runners over, and driving runners in.”
North Central travels down to Bloomington on Friday to face Illinois Wesleyan before returning home on Saturday for a double header with the Titans. Live audio can be found on WONC.org while live stats will be up on NorthCentralCardinals.com.
