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Bantam Beavers strong in home tournament

May 29, 2017 | 12:00 PM

Sixteen teams converged on the Civic Centre diamonds this past weekend for some bantam baseball where the hometown North Battleford Beavers lost in the ‘B’ final after going 3-2.

The Beavers finished second in their pool in the round robin after going 2-1, and then defeated the Buccaneer Braves 12-2 in Sunday’s first playoff game before falling 13-2 to the Blue Jay Sluggers in their final game.

“This weekend was good — it showed hopefully what we’ll have for the upcoming season here,” Beavers coach Dean Dimmick said after Sunday’s afternoon loss in the ‘B’ final. “[This afternoon] we didn’t play like we did all weekend. As I was telling the guys, I don’t think we made an error all weekend and in this game we had probably four or five this game alone and it just shows the difference of [being] error-free.”

The Sluggers made them pay for those errors, as the game ended early because of the mercy rule.

“We didn’t play our best this game but hats off to them. They’re a pretty good team,” Dimmick said. “We were fortunate to be on the other side of [the mercy rule] three other games this weekend.”

That’s because all three of the Beavers wins were by 10 or more runs. They even scored 24 runs in one of Saturday’s games.

But Dimmick said hitting is actually not the strength of his team.

“What we’re seeing so far is our pitching probably has been [our strength],” Dimmick said. “We throw strikes. We get a lot of strikeouts. The biggest thing is we don’t give away many walks. At this level, any level of ball, if you can get away from any freebies, that’s a good thing. That’s probably our biggest strength.”

The bantam Beavers play league ball in a Saskatoon league where they are currently 2-3-1. 

But tournament play is all about gearing up for provincials.

For bantam provincials, there is no set host. Instead, seeding and hosts are determined around the middle of June, so right now, the Beavers are just trying to wins as many games to help their cause for where they’ll be ranked next month.

“All this is part of our seeding and ranking for provincials,” Dimmick said, referring to any tournament play. “What Sask Baseball will do is they’ll rank all the teams [based on] games up until the first week of June. They’ll rank you, seed you, and put you accordingly.”

Dimmick added that the provincial team will be a little bit different than the league team.

He also made sure to give a shout out to all those involved with hosting a successful tournament this past weekend.

“Hats off to parents and to [Battlefords Minor Baseball Association] for putting all this together,” he said. “It was a good half dozen guys who took Friday off and put in a solid eight, nine-hour day [to prepare].”

Next weekend the Beavers will play in a tournament in Unity and then on the June 17 weekend they will take part in a big Saskatoon tournament with 24 teams, including some from Alberta. They will also play in a tournament in Muenster on June 24 and 25.

 

nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca

@NathanKanter11