Wonders searching for consistency

By Bill Kiser
Kannapolis Citizen
A.L. Brown baseball coach Empsy Thompson is thankful that his Wonders are playing .500 ball though the first month of the season.
While Thompson said that Brown could easily have had a few more wins, he also admitted that the Wonders could have had a few more losses.
“We could be 8-2 right now,” Thompson said. “A lot of our problems were self-inflicted — situations that if we had taken care of the baseball, we’d be out of innings having given up only one or two runs instead of six, seven or eight runs.
“We’re still trying to figure out some things … but we’re still right in the thick of things. We’ve just got to finish strong.”
Brown, which was 5-5 overall and 3-4 in the South Piedmont Conference entering Tuesday’s fifth-place game against Mount Pleasant in the Intimidators Classic, split its last four games, winning twice and losing twice.
After the Intimidators Classic, the Wonders resume their regular-season schedule with a non-conference game at South Rowan on Thursday.
The Wonders began last week with a 6-3 win over SPC foe Hickory Ridge at home on March 18, their third consecutive victory, but followed that two days later with an 8-6 conference road loss to Porter Ridge.
Then, Brown was thrashed by cross-town rival Northwest Cabarrus 10-2 on March 22 in the opening round of the Intimidator Classic, being played at Fieldcrest Cannon Stadium. But the Wonders bounced back on Monday, beating Albemarle 7-5 in the Classic’s consolation round.
“Northwest is the first team that really beat us up pretty bad,” Thompson said. “But against Porter Ridge, they scored eight runs in the fourth inning on us. We were cruising, but they had a big inning.”
In fact, four of Brown’s five losses this season have come by four runs or less — a factor that Thompson attributes to his team’s overall inexperience.
“We’re very young … and obviously one of our biggest knocks is our inexperience,” he said. “We’ve got some kids that’s gonna be good in the future, but they’ve got to do a little growing up now. There’s nothing we can do about it, because we’re going to put the best product we can out on the field on a consistent basis.”
While the Wonders have six seniors on their roster, they’ve had to rely more and more on underclassmen. Against Albemarle, Thompson started three freshmen and three sophomores.
“Yeah, we’ve got a lot of inexperience, and the kids just haven’t been making plays,” Thompson said. “But these kids have played baseball long enough where they can do the basics and not get to the point where you have to make an excuse for them every time they don’t make a play.
“We should be able to make routine plays; that’s our issue right now. It’s not like we’re making diving plays, throwing people out from the fence or hitting home runs with two outs in the bottom of the seventh. It’s been the routine things that we’ve made mistakes on, and they’ve cost us. We’ve just got to be consistent and make those average plays.”