Rocky would be the best way to describe the 2016 Spartan baseball team’s season. It’s had its highs and its lows. It’s had blowout victories in which the defense places a vice-like grip on opposing offenses, as well as losses in which the team can barely score a single run. For every bright spot on the team, a shadow is cast upon the deficiencies in a season marred by inconsistency.

“Coming into the season we had pretty high expectations considering we were expected to be one of the better teams in the Colonial League,” senior John Hendricks said.

The season started out as well as anyone could have hoped with a 3-0 record including a 17-4 victory over Northern Lehigh. But as the story of the season goes, everything changed. The team then went on to compile four consecutive losses, including two shutouts and a matchup against Northwestern where the Spartan defense gave up 18 runs. However, Southern Lehigh has been surely and steadily improving since a 2014 season that saw the team go 9-10.

“We’ve had some really good games where we’ve played quite well,” assistant baseball coach Mr. Matt Greenawald said. “We also had some games where we had quite a bit of improvements to do.”

The team boasted an experienced roster this year, including seniors Jacob Cassel, John Hendricks, Derek Barnes, and Dylan Niedbalski. All have lived up to the hype in their send-off year; however, it has not effectively translated into the wins column. For example Jacob Cassel leads the team in strikeouts with 21 and holds a 1.75 ERA to his name, but despite what looks like the key to team success based off the stats, has only lead to a 3-3 record.

This inconsistency between stats and the final scoreboard is one of the leading causes of the variety of the outcomes of close games such as a 5-3 loss to Palmerton. However, there have been more close victories than defeats, leading the Spartans to a playoff berth.

“We’ve got some work to do if we wanna get to that championship level,” Coach Greenawald said, “but I think our guys understand that if we play the way that we can we can beat anyone in our league.”

The Spartans enter the Colonial League playoffs as the fourth seeded team in the league. However, if the team hopes to make a deep run to the championship and eventually a spot in the District XI playoffs they need to clean up their game. A championship team cannot have losses that are the likes of 13-1 but then win other matchups by stunning margins such as a 10-0 victory over Moravian Academy and then nearly squeak out victories such as a 3-2 victory over a Saucon Valley team that was 7-9 at the time of publication.

Several of the Spartans blowout losses can be attributed to an offensive deficiency that was evident early on in the season where the team had 16 consecutive runless innings.

“We need to work on hitting,” Hendricks said. “Our team is a decent hitting team but not quite as good as some of our competition such as Bangor and Northwestern.”

However, as the saying goes, defense wins championships. This is advantageous for the Spartans who have one of the top defenses in their division, boasting ten wins where the opposition has scored four or fewer runs, including two shutouts. The Spartans’ best victories of the season include a 2-1 win over Notre Dame Green Pond, who finished the season third in the Colonial League, a 7-3 win over Palmerton, and a 3-2 victory over 2015 Colonial League champion Saucon Valley who finished the season with six games being decided by one or two runs. All of these games are relatively low scoring, a testament to the strong defense fielded by Coach Todd Miller and his staff.

Other than themselves, the biggest roadblock to winning a Colonial League title is a Bangor team who finished the season with an undefeated 20-0 record and have outscored their opponents 168-27, allowing three or more runs only twice. The problem for Southern Lehigh is the way the seeding works out, creating a situation where the Spartans have to beat number one seeded Bangor in order to even make the finals.

“There are a couple of teams on top right now, Bangor, Northwestern, we’ve played both of them already, we’ve lost to both of them already, but on the flipside we did not play well in either of those games,” Coach Greenawald said, “so moving forward, our guys are optimistic that if we go out there and play the way that we can there’s nobody we can’t beat.”