Playoffs begin Wednesday for SCBL regular season champs, Piedmont Pride

The Piedmont Pride enters the Southern Collegiate Baseball League postseason Wednesday having won nine of its last 10 games.

But it’s that one loss that sticks out in coach Joe Hudak’s mind as the potential danger heading into Wednesday’s game at Winthrop Ballpark. The Pride will face the winner of Statesville and Lake Norman’s matchup from Tuesday night. Each of the first two rounds are one-game playoffs, followed by the championship series, which is best two-out-of-three.

Hudak isn’t in love with the set-up and the SCBL’s board of directors have already discussed making the second round a best-of-three series as well, as early as next year.

“Everybody has at least one good pitcher and baseball is a game where also you can hit five or six balls right on the button and they go right to somebody, and the other team can hit a bunch of flairs and routine ground balls that get through,” said Hudak. “So it’s just a game where anybody can beat anybody.”

That doesn’t mean the coach and his team aren’t confident.

The Pride’s first round bye - courtesy of winning the league’s regular season title by a full nine games and claiming the No. 1 seed - means the team almost certainly won’t face either potential opponent’s ace pitcher. The Pride enter the playoffs on a positive streak, having won six straight games, and Hudak’s bunch is a combined 13-3 against Statesville and Lake Norman this summer.

“We have to go out and play our best game Wednesday and hope we get the chance to advance,” he said before the Pride’s practice on Tuesday.

Standout stats

The Piedmont Pride dominated its first regular season of Southern Collegiate Baseball League play, finishing 32-6, a full nine games ahead of second-best team, Showcase Baseball Academy Bones. A few standout stats from the Pride’s successful summer thus far:

▪ The Pride has allowed 28 fewer earned runs (94 in 38 games) than the other five teams in the league, and committed the fewest errors in the league (45), by eight.

▪ The Pride boasts the league’s top two hitters in Tanner Poole (.369) and Jake Barbee (.361), and has scored 43 more runs than any other team.

▪ Pride starting pitcher Zack Kamerman has allowed four earned runs in over 32 innings of work, good for a league-best 1.10 ERA. He’s also struck out 34 batters and walked just five.

▪ Another Pride starting pitcher, Daniel Sweeney, leads the SCBL in first pitch strike percentage, at 85 percent. Sweeney, from East Tennessee State, hasn’t walked more than one batter in any of his seven appearances (six starts) this summer, and has just four walks total.

This story was originally published July 21, 2015 at 4:19 PM with the headline "Playoffs begin Wednesday for SCBL regular season champs, Piedmont Pride."