Tuatara showing potential
Sunday was the day Baseball New Zealand and the Auckland Tuatara had been hoping for all along.
A bumper crowd turned up, including the man of the moment Nathan McCullum to throw out the first pitch, the weather was at last glorious and the team thrashed Canberra
9-1.There’s still a way to go to establish the Tuatara as one of New Zealand’s leading professional sporting teams, but this was a step in the right direction.
It was also something to build on for this weekend’s series against the Sydney Blue Sox, which will be the team’s last at home this season.
Of all of the games the Tuatara had played so far, their win on Sunday was by far their best performance, Josh Collmenter pitched well and their hits came nice and early.
‘‘We could breathe a little bit and we had some sun,’’ Tuatara manager Steve Mintz said of the game.
‘‘To get the four-run inning, back it up with the three-run inning and then put two more up, that’s how you want to do it.
‘‘When you’ve got a team down, you want to keep them down and Josh Collmenter was great out there, getting us into the sixth inning and pitching well.
‘‘Then we were able to get a couple of our development guys out there.
‘‘With the fans, this is what we’d hoped baseball in New Zealand would look like and we were happy to see all of these kids out on the field afterwards.’’
It wasn’t that the Tuatara weren’t getting hits in the other three games of the Canberra series, but on Sunday they came at crucial times, with runners on base and to be up 9-0 after four innings, the game was as good as over.
‘‘Any time you can get a big lead like that on a team, it makes it a whole lot easier,’’ Mintz said.
‘‘But I just kept reiterating that I’ve seen game like this on Sundays in the ABL, where they can flip very quickly.
‘‘So I was making sure I was keeping the guys focused on what we were trying to do, making sure the pitchers were staying in the zone and attacking like we should.
‘‘We wanted the game over, we didn’t want them to get a breath of life and get back into the ball game.’’
The Blue Sox will come to Auckland on a three-game losing streak and it’s an important one for the Tuatara. If they win it, they’ll move back to .500 and it will also give their fans a good lasting impression over the next
11 months until they’ll play in New Zealand again.
Mintz says he’ll spend the next few days looking at how to improve on the series against Brisbane.