With new ballpark, Huskies are on the rise
STORRS — Jim Penders takes a few extra steps to start work each day, making it a point to enter Elliot Ballpark through the portal behind home plate.
“I pinch myself every day,” Penders said. “I make sure I walk up through the portal because that’s the way you see your first baseball stadium, and that’s the way I want to see this every day.
“So I walk through the portal and it just pops, like coming out of a tunnel. It doesn’t get old, and I can’t imagine it ever getting old.”
When Penders walked into UConn’s new, longawaited baseball stadium Saturday morning for an intrasquad scrimmage, there were scouts from 20 major-league organizations spread out in the grandstand. The playing of games on the stunning artificial surface, with fans filling the 1,500 seats and spread out on lawn chairs on the berms beyond the bleachers is still several months away, and with COVID-19 there is no date certain. But the Huskies have a collection of talent that will draw attention.
“You see the pictures, brand-new ballpark, and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s gorgeous,’” said Pat Winkel, a catcher from Amity Regional High in Woodbridge who is back from Tommy John surgery and could be drafted in the first five rounds.
“It’s hard to believe it until you actually step on it that it’s yours.”
For decades, the Huskies played their games on the other side of Jim Calhoun Way, in spartan J.O. Christian Field, beautiful in its day but more like a high school facility by 2019, long outgrown by the UConn program, which has been to six NCAA Tournaments and developed seven majorleaguers since 2010.
Raising the funds and getting the approval to the plans and the funds to build a new place was a long process, but with the lead gift of Doug Elliot, a former catcher, it has at last risen from the wooded area behind the hockey rink, next to the new soccer facility.
“Doug was here Friday night and I was in the third base coaching box for five or-six innings,” Penders said, “I couldn’t help but think about all the fits and starts in getting this thing off the ground, and in the ground.”
The field turf will give UConn the chance to get home games in during the rainy periods of March and April as water and snow can just be pushed off. The lights provide the opportunity to play night games to which more fans and students can come, and for players to get on the field and work as late as they choose.
This week, when assistant coach Chris Podeszwa wanted more energy in a workout that followed a morning downpour, he told the players, “It rained 3 inches this morning. You’re the first team the history of the program that can practice on a baseball field on a day that it rained. We’re not going to take this for granted.”
UConn had won five in a row when last season was halted March 13, and the scheduled opener for Elliot Ballpark was wiped out, like the rest of the season, by the pandemic. With health and safety guidelines in place, masks included, the team was abletobeginafallprogramand is now playing scrimmages.
The restored year of eligibility gave Chris Winkel, who graduated last spring, the chance to play the season with his brother that was lost to Pat’s elbow surgery.
“I feel like we had some unfinished business last year,” Chris said, “and I really didn’t want it to end that way. The new field is
unbelievable, I’d love to break it in. Getting to play another year with Pat is a big thing, and I really feel Coach Mac said it really well, that ‘this could very well be the longest UConn baseball season ever.’ ”
By longest, pitching coach Josh MacDonald was referring to a deep postseason run. UConn made it as far as the super regionals in 2011, with a team that had George Springer, Matt Barnes — for whom the new UConn bullpen is named — and Nick Ahmed, all drafted within the first two rounds. And if the Huskies do make the NCAA Tournament, this ballpark is suitable to host.
This team has at least
two who could be drafted that high: Pat Winkel and pitcher Ben Casparius, who threw two impressive innings Saturday. Casparius, right-hander from Westport, started his career at North Carolina and had to sit out last season after transferring. When he was not picked in the abbreviated major-league draft in June, he chose to return to UConn.
“Ben could have gotten a pretty good professional team out [Saturday],” Penders said. “He was light’s out; nobody had a chance against him. It was really electric.”