Parker Brodina celebrating his home run with the team/Photos by Noah Clooten
With the playoffs in full swing, the Devils Lake baseball team’s regular season has come to an end.
And boy, what a year it was.
Regardless of how things turn out in the postseason, the Firebirds have a lot to be proud of for the campaign they just put up. They competed with some of the top teams in the state and finished as the No. 4 seed out of 12 teams in the EDC.
Here’s how they did it.
Devils Lake ended up with a team batting line of .255/.428/.328. The most notable part of that tally is the on-base percentage, which was fueled by a 16.2% walk rate. The Firebirds showed disciplined patience at the plate all season long, even early on when the bats hadn’t gotten going yet. The offense eventually did find its footing, and it never lost its propensity for getting on base in the process. Even some of the players who didn’t hit as much still posted double-digit walk rates (Ben Larson, Trason Beck, Taydon Triepke and Will Heilman, just to name a few).
The best individual hitting performance came from senior third baseman Jackson Baeth. He smashed three of the team’s four home runs and led the team in most offensive categories. In addition to a .364 batting average, he posted an OBP of .460 and slugging percentage of .621. All those marks were team highs by a fairly wide margin — especially the slugging. Only one other Firebird even reached .400 (Parker Brodina).
Baeth was a particularly valuable asset in a league that definitely leans more towards pitching. There aren’t a lot of home runs at the high school level, and many games are won simply by which team can be cleaner and more fundamentally sound. The Firebirds were pros at that. Their game was to play small ball and force the other teams to make mistakes. They pulled off successful squeeze plays throughout the season and laid down perfectly placed bunts.
So to have somebody like Baeth was extra valuable, because he added some oomph to complement the rest of the lineup’s scrappy mentality.
Baeth drew his fair share of walks, too, drawing a base on balls 13.8% of the time. But he wasn’t even in the top three walkers on the team. The honorary walk champion has to be Mason Palmer, who posted a rate of 21.8%. Nearly a quarter of the time Palmer came to the plate, he got on base via a walk.
That relates to a broader point of Palmer being a fairly unheralded star of this team. He didn’t have any extra-base hits, but he did just about everything else well on the baseball field. After a slow start with the bat, he hit .271 to complement his barrage of walks. That gave him a .436 OBP, third-best on the team. And defensively, it’s safe to say he was the Firebirds’ best fielder. Shortstop defense is valuable on its own, but Palmer was particularly smooth at the position with impressive range that took away hits from opponents.
He was also arguably the team’s most effective pitcher. He only threw a relatively mild 18 2/3 innings, but he was dominant when he got the chance to pitch. He posted a 1.92 ERA, which was supported by a 1.64 FIP. The reason for that sparkling FIP was a 12.05 K/9 — the best on the team — and a 2.89 BB/9. He struck a lot of hitters out, didn’t issue many walks and never allowed a home run. He rose to the occasion when facing top MLB draft prospect Drew Rerick, nearly matching him for seven fantastic innings.
More on the pitching in a second.
The offense rounding into form can’t be fully explained without mentioning the progression of Fausten Olson. He began the season as the leadoff hitter, then quickly moved into the two-hole. He struggled early on; his batting average was floating around .100, and he wasn’t even walking much, either. But to say he turned it on down the stretch would be an understatement.
Olson talked about working with the coaches to simplify his swing, and it paid dividends. He became an on-base machine over the latter half of the season, and ended up raising his season average to .288 (second-best on the team, behind only Baeth) and OBP to .402. Considering how slow he started, that’s a massive, massive jump. He rewarded head coach Brent Luehring for keeping him in the top of the order even when things weren’t going well, and he went from one of the team’s least productive hitters to one of its most productive.
Olson’s weighted on-base average (wOBA) was .349, the third-best on the team. Baeth had the team’s best, at .455, while Beau Brodina was second at .385.
That leads us to Brodina, who handled leadoff duties for most of the season. He did exactly what a leadoff hitter needs to do: get on base. His .444 OBP was second on the team, behind only Baeth’s .460. His 18.9% walk rate was also second, behind only Palmer. Overall, it’s safe to designate Brodina as the team’s second-most productive hitter this season, behind only the monstrous Baeth. Brodina’s production came in quieter, more subdued form, but he was the only hitter besides Baeth with an OPS above .800.
The third-best OPS on the team came from his younger brother Parker. P. Brodina lacked the pristine approach of B. Brodina — his 30.4 and 7.1 strikeout and walk rates, respectively, weren’t great — but he hit the only non-Baeth home run on the team. As previously mentioned, he had the second-highest slugging percentage on the team. He hit a solid .280 as well.
Now to the pitching, where Devils Lake posted a 4.24 season ERA. It’s worth noting that that mark was under 4.00 for the majority of the year. The FIP was a little better, at 3.70, largely due to the way Devils Lake was able to limit home runs. The Firebirds didn’t surrender a long ball until over halfway into the season, and ended up allowing four total. They struck out 7.4 batters per nine innings, while walking 4.7 per nine.
P. Brodina was valuable in going deep into games and striking people out. His 6.25 ERA doesn’t look super pretty, but his FIP was only 3.59 thanks to a 9.0 K/9. He also threw a team-high 36 innings, accounting for 24% of the team’s innings. Luehring consistently praised his ability to compete and keep Devils Lake in games even when he wasn’t at his best. His results faded towards the end of the season, but overall he was the Firebirds’ most durable and consistent arm.
Palmer’s elite effectiveness in a smaller sample gave Devils Lake somewhat of a secret weapon behind Brodina. Also quietly performing well were Larson (2.45 ERA in 33 innings) and Hunter Remmick (2.84 ERA, 1.89 BB/9 in 19 innings). The Firebirds weren’t necessarily a flashy team on the pitching side, but they quietly went out there with a deep and versatile staff.
All this has set them up to be a competitive team in the playoffs. Postseason baseball is notorious for being unpredictable, and it can often come down to a single at-bat or play. No matter how the season turns out, Devils Lake did an impressive job of patching a team together that could compete with the bigger Fargo schools in the EDC, and it’s an impressive statistical season to look back at.
