Sports
New Bats, New Confidence for Novato Baseball Team
When the NCS Championships begin Wednesday at Albany, the Hornets expect to pack a much more potent offense after having to hit with wood bats during the MCAL season.
For the baseball team, there was only one thing more exciting than Sunday’s announcement that it had gotten a berth in the North Coast Section Championships.
Monday’s ping of the bat.
Yes, ping.
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NCS play means a return to metal bats, if they choose, for Marin County Athletic League teams, and the Hornets plan to take advantage when they travel to Albany for Wednesday’s first-round game at 5 p.m. at Memorial Field.
San Marin, the top seed in NCS Division 3, earned a first-round bye and won't play until Friday.
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“In batting practice, we’re hitting the ball to the gaps. We’re hitting some home runs,” Novato coach boasted. “This should be really exciting.”
The added oomph of metal bats is the perfect fit for 12th-seeded Novato, which earned its NCS berth mainly on the strength of good pitching and good defense.
Scheppler expect more of the same Wednesday against Division 3’s fifth-seeded team.
“We’re going to go with our best lineup and our best pitching,” he noted. “ will pitch and , who has been our other pitcher, will play third base. That gives us our best defensive combination with one of our best pitchers.”
The Hornets enter the event with just a 13-12 record, but that was with wood bats. They lost four of their last five, for example, mostly because they scored a total of just seven runs in those games.
“It doesn’t matter who we’re playing. We’re competing with ourselves,” said Scheppler, who admitted he didn’t know much about the 18-6 Cougars.
“The last couple of games, we played good defense and had excellent pitching. But the bats haven’t come around. But we’ve been hitting well in practice.”
Scheppler is most excited about the fact Mendelsohn, and – the middle of his lineup – have really been striping the ball since the switch to metal. That makes NCS a brand new ballgame.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re 1 or 16,” he said of the seedings. “You’re going to have to beat the best team at some point, whether it’s the first game or the last game. We expect to do well.”
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