It’s been three weeks since Jeff Safrit opened the sports section and saw something ugly — no wins and five losses for last-place East Rowan in the SPC baseball standings.
Shocking as it was, the news didn’t qualify as a stop-the-presses, full-blown crisis out in GQ. Yet the Mustangs, a team steeped in winning tradition, were clearly making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
“Things didn’t bounce our way,” Safrit, the 11th-year coach, explained Friday night at Newman Park, where East won for the eighth time in its past nine games. “We lost games 2-1. We lost 5-4 in eight innings. We were in every ballgame and yes, we did have opportunities to win all of them.”
The point is they didn’t. A more important one is that they are now. “Better to lose in March,” said outfielder Adam Cornelius, “and win in April and May. This is the time to start playing well.”
The problem, according to a straw poll of Mustangs, was easily defined. They weren’t getting the clutch hit and they were striking out an average of 8.4 times per game.
“We didn’t execute when we needed to execute,” said junior shortstop Cal Hayes. “We couldn’t put it all together. It was frustrating.”
Included in the early-season tailspin was a 2-1 opening-day loss to SPC front-runner Central Cabarrus; a 3-0 setback to West Rowan right-hander Jared Barnette; and a forfeit to visiting A.L. Brown on March 19 — the game from which Safrit was ejected for debating an umpire’s decision.
“That was the low point,” said Safrit. “I didn’t know how we were gonna be after that.”
He needn’t have worried. Like a bellicose instigator for a sluggish hockey team, Safrit’s actions ignited the Mustangs.
“It fired us up,” said Cornelius. “It’s like we said, ‘We’re tired of losing.’ We weren’t used to that. This group has always won, from Little League on up.“
Hayes, the do-everything .426 hitter out of the leadoff spot, saw something many of us missed. “When Coach Safrit got thrown out,” he said, “we realized how much he cared about this team. Sure, he was mad. But he did that for us and it made us want to play harder for him.”
Teammate Nick Lefko echoed that sentiment, reporting that no one on the team wanted to raise the white flag.
“When we were 0-5 everybody kind of forgot about us,” he said. “That was a mistake. Even the other coaches were pulling against us. They’d call each other and say, ‘Keep them down. Beat them down.’ The truth is even though we had that ‘0’ in the win column, no one wanted to play us.”
For good reason. Rather suddenly, East morphed into a team with Reggie Jackson’s sense of timing and the killer instinct of a jungle cat.
“We quit loafing, that’s what we did,” said Jeremy Teague, the straight-shooting senior with the county-best 0.64 ERA. “Early in the year we would get ahead of people and start cruising instead of putting them away. That’s what changed. Now we come out, bust our butts and get our minds right. Now we’re ready to play two hours before gametime.”
East’s about-face began March 22 when Teague pitched a brilliant three-hitter in a 4-1 victory over Sun Valley ace David McKinney, who fanned 13 Mustangs. Next came a win over Concord and then another over Sun Valley.
“Coach Safrit didn’t give up,” said assistant coach Derry Steedley. “He kept working the team hard in practice, giving them extra drills. Instead of getting down, we spent more time with the kids, making sure they knew the simple things like hitting the ball where it’s pitched and being ready to hit the first fastball strike.”
East’s resurgence stalled temporarily on March 28, when Central Cabarrus right-hander Brian York collected 16 strikeouts in a 2-1 victory. But two days later there was a 7-3 win at Kannapolis and then a significant 12-1 rout of Piedmont. “That showed we were together,” said Teague. “It showed we could put people away.”
The Mustangs squared their league record at 6-6 with a win over West last Friday and moved a game over .500 following Tuesday’s 9-2 decision over Harding. Three conference games remain: home against Concord next Friday and a pair with Northwest Cabarrus the following week.
“This team is having fun again,” said Lefko, the right-fielder with the right outlook. “Even when we do something wrong, Coach Safrit is quick to pump us up. And every player is pulling for every other player. It’s a great feeling. We’re getting better, but we’re having fun along the way.”
Now that’s a pretty picture.
David Shaw