Red Sox set for whirlwind camp before opening against Yorkton
Regina Red Sox head coach Mitch MacDonald has a spring in his step now that training camp is imminent.
“It’s always nice when you’ve been hammering away on the phones for eight or nine months,” he says. “You can finally start to meet some faces and see some guys and hear their voices again. The clubhouse comes alive. It makes it worthwhile.”
The Red Sox begin workouts Saturday at Currie Field. After five days of training camp, Regina will open the regular season on June 1 against the host Yorkton Cardinals.
“You try to hammer in as much as possible in training camp while at the same time keeping it as simple as possible,” MacDonald says. “You don’t want to overload guys with too much stuff. They’ve all come from college programs and they have far more intricate systems there and a lot more time to implement those things.
“We try to keep things fairly simple and let them go out and do what they’re best at doing.”
The Western Major Baseball League provides a summertime option for Canadians and Americans who play college baseball in the United States.
The list of import returnees includes Aden Campbell (a team-high .362 batting average last season), Derek Slate (.296) and Seth Sorensen (a 2.78 earned run average).
As well, the 2017 Red Sox roster will include at least seven Saskatchewan-born players — Luke Lubiniecki, Chase Nistor, Jeremy Sylvester and Kendal Daniels, all of Regina, along with Jordan Schulz (Strasbourg), Geordie McDougall (Lumsden) and Griffin Keller (Pilot Butte).
“Trying to match personalities in such a short window isn’t the easiest thing in the world, so you try to get to know guys as quickly as possible and see how they like to operate things,” MacDonald says. “You want them to be as comfortable as possible from the get-go.
“When guys are as comfortable as possible, you get the most out of them. We’re just trying to do new things and try new things with comfortability.”
The objective is to improve upon last year, when Regina posted a 2621 regular-season record before being swept out of the playoffs by Yorkton.
“Most coaches will say that you’re judged by what you do at the end of the season, come playoff time,” MacDonald says. “We came up a little short, so we tried to do some different things in recruiting this year to come at things from a different angle. We’ll see if we can get to the ultimate task, which is winning a WMBL championship.”
Regina plays its first three games on the road before making its 2017 home debut on June 4 at 2:05 p.m., against Yorkton.