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Loss of ace leaves Comets looking toward playoffs
(by Tony Lange - April 25, 2012)
Loss of ace leaves Comets looking toward playoffs
By TONY LANGE
Conference titles can disappear quickly during the short spring season, as it did for Solon's baseball team last week.
After starting their season 5-1, with a 2-0 Northeast Ohio Conference record in the Valley Division, the Comets quickly fell to 5-5 with a 2-4 NOC record. They lost a two-game series to Hudson and a two-game series to Mayfield last week.
With 13 games left on their schedule, starting at Lakewood 7 p.m. April 27, the Comets are mathematically eliminated from a conference title, head coach Damien Kopkas said.
"We talked about setting a new goal for ourselves and refocusing," he said. "We're three weeks away from the postseason, and we have to come together as a team and remain unified and just really start to build up our confidence. We have a new goal in sight. We have to be clicking on all cylinders when we get to that postseason."
After losing four straight, Solon got back above .500 with a win against Paul Laurence Dunbar of Lexington, Ky., last Friday.
The Comets traveled to the Cincinnati area to play in the 11th annual A.J. Cohen Memorial Tournament held at Midland Field near Amelia.
The tournament draws a lot of scouts, both college and professional, Kopkas said.
"There's some college games and high school games, so it obviously draws a lot of scouts, and the original thought was for our Saturday game to be our top pitcher, Matt Smoral, against Vandalia-Butler's top pitcher, Taylore Cherry," he said. "It was kind of built to be a dream matchup, if you will, with those two pitchers facing off against one another."
Both Smoral and Cherry played summer ball together and committed to play college ball next season at the University of North Carolina.
Unfortunately, Smoral, a senior for the Comets who hurls a 95 mph fastball and 85 mph slider, broke his foot during Solon's spring break trip to Myrtle Beach, S.C., at the beginning of the season.
Plus, Saturday's game in Cincinnati got rained out.
"It was the day after he pitched while we were down in South Carolina," Kopkas said about Smoral's injury. "He just happened to be walking on the beach, and he reached down to pick something up, and I don't know if his hand shifted a little bit, but he just felt a pop in his foot, and it turned out to be a stress fracture. It was kind of a freak injury, unexpected and sort of a shock to him, but he's very mature, and he's handled it very well."
Smoral's surgery was successful, and if he rehabs and strengthens his foot properly, it should not be a problem for the rest of his career, Kopkas said.
"It was unfortunate that he had to end up missing his senior season, but I think it's something where he's got a brighter future beyond high school, and he's got that to think about," Kopkas said.
On the mound during Solon's win against Dunbar, senior Aaron Epstein pitched a complete-game shutout to lead the Comets to a 4-0 victory, which improved their record to 6-5.
Before that game, the Comets were struggling with multiple facets, Kopkas said.
"We hadn't pitched very well. We really hadn't been able to get a clutch base hit to keep us in ballgames, so the fact that Aaron came out, we knew he was able to throw a lot of innings," Kopkas said. "When he's hitting his spots, he's been very successful in the past, so we opted to giving him the start down there, and he responded by throwing a complete game, a three-hitter with four strikeouts. So he was definitely the story of the game."
"He just kept their hitters off balance, got a lot of routine ground balls, routine fly balls, he was just very, very successful. Thankfully, we were able to get a few clutch base hits and a few runs across the board to get him a victory."
The Comets were error free in that game with nine hits. Leading the offensive effort, senior Nate Schecter was three-for-three at the plate.
High school baseball seasons are so short that batting averages can rise or drop 50 to 100 points in a game, which make stats overrated, Kopkas said.
"The best thing that I saw in that game on Friday is we really had good at-bats," he said. "In the past, our good at-bats, unfortunately, led to outs.
"I like to look at the stats, but I don't really like to base a lot of decisions on stats. I use the eyeball test. If you are putting together a string of good at-bats, playing well in the field, as a pitcher, are you throwing strikes, are you doing your job? I think you can see that visually, and sometimes the stats don't really tell you the full picture."
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