Baseball season drifts into the sunset

The baseball season has come and gone…again. Devils Lake recently wrapped up its second baseball season of the year, following up a strong spring with an equally impressive summer campaign.

But, in just as equal fashion, the team took a tough exit in the playoffs.

At the very beginning of the spring, Devils Lake third baseman Jackson Baeth said this was the best he’d ever felt about a Devils Lake team that he’d been a part of. That left a world of possibilities to ponder: Just how far would this team go? And how would it do in the summer, with a different class system and the addition of Simon Beach?

Now we know the answers to those questions.

Even as the sting of defeat lingered fresh last week in Mandan, coach Brent Luehring said he was proud of his team for accomplishing the goals they set out at the beginning: to win an EDC game, and to make it to the state tournament in the summer. It can’t be ignored how far this program has come, and how successful a year it was.

Yet even those milestones arguably don’t do this team justice. I’ve written quite a bit in the past about how disciplined this offensive group was — in both the spring and summer — and how deep the lineup was, especially in the summer after players like Trason Beck and Hunter Remmick broke out. There’s also Baeth, who was the team’s best hitter in the spring and was perhaps overshadowed in the summer, but still had a strong campaign in his own right and hit a home run in the state tournament.

It’s easy to imagine this team — whether in the spring or summer — going further than it actually did. During the regular spring season, the Firebirds beat some of the opponents they ended up getting surpassed by in the playoffs. Pitching was the main downfall of that run. Devils Lake, competing against North Dakota’s very top baseball teams, was in a position it hadn’t been in very often, and it made a valiant effort but couldn’t quite squeeze through the crop.

Then in the summer, the three-class system — with Devils Lake in the middle one — meant the Storm had to be one of the most favored teams. A team that competed in the EDC, plus was getting their old friend Beach back, was in a prime position to make some serious noise this summer.

And they did. The Storm went on to lock up the No. 1 seed in the Class A East during the regular season. They hit a brief stumble in the region tournament, losing to the No. 9 seed in the first round, but fought and clawed their way back to advance to the state tournament.

Goal accomplished.

Baeth even said — after their first win in the state tournament, a 10-0 defeat of Minot — that he didn’t want to jinx anything, but Devils Lake was arguably the favored team to win it. The Storm proved as much in the regular season, edging out the defending state champion Wahpeton Post 20 for the top seed.

But a disaster against Wahpeton and a nail-biter against Bismarck ended the reign of Devils Lake baseball in 2024.

After watching the games and looking at the stats, the main culprit for Devils Lake’s postseason performance is the decreased quality of plate appearances. It’s what drove this team in both seasons up until this point: working counts, drawing walks and finding any way to get on base. Now, the Storm did play some of their signature small ball in the win over Minot, but overall — especially in the region tournament, but really the whole postseason — they were swinging earlier in counts and giving pitchers an easier time of beating them.

Devils Lake had a team walk rate of nearly 15% in the spring and over 14% in the summer. That number plummeted to 5.2% in the summer postseason. The strange thing is that, despite the early slump, the team actually posted a batting average of .301 this postseason. Granted, a lot of that was fueled by a 14-hit performance in the season-ending 4-3 loss to Bismarck, where Devils Lake piled up hits but couldn’t piece them together well enough.

Still, the overall takeaway here is that the hits came — eventually — but the overall approach decreased. Chalk it up to the heat of the moment, or having to face better pitching, or any other multitude of things. Devils Lake’s strikeout rate actually stayed about the same — 13.02% in the postseason after 13.04% in the regular season — but the overall at-bat quality wasn’t up to the same high standard. Plus, some of the Storm’s top hitters like Beau Brodina and Mason Palmer cooled off at the wrong time.

Pitching, unlike the spring postseason, was not a point of weakness at all. Even with the one rough Parker Brodina start — with Brodina in a tough spot, having not pitched in a month and facing the top seed in the tournament — the Storm posted a 2.60 team ERA in the playoffs. They combined to walk just 2.4 batters per nine innings and put up a 66% strike rate. Pitching is what got them to the state tournament when the offense was low, and it really held solid through the end of the summer.

And the way Beach finished things off gives him something to hold his head up high about. He pitched five no-hit innings in the final start of his Legion career. He was a leader of this team all summer long, both with his team-high innings pitched and coach-like presence from the dugout.

So many kids had impressive summers to be proud about that there’s almost too many to name. Beck hit .357, walked more than twice as often as he struck out, hit a home run and recorded some clutch hits in the playoffs. Palmer led the team with 33 hits, including a grand slam. Remmick had the highest OPS on the team during the regular season, tying with B. Brodina for the most homers on the team and forcing his way into the starting lineup.

On the pitching side, Palmer posted a sub-2.00 ERA in both the spring and summer. Max Palmer and Will Heilman took big strides too, giving Devils Lake effective outings when they got a chance to pitch. Left-hander Taydon Triepke shined this summer as well, providing reliable outings in the late innings with a 2.33 ERA.

And the future is still bright. Pitchers like the Palmers, Remmick, Triepke, Ben Larson, Heilman and P. Brodina will all be back next year. Cayden McCarthy has shined on a couple of occasions as well, including the state tournament game against the eventual state champion, Wahpeton, when he didn’t allow an earned run in five innings.

McCarthy was the frontline starter on the B team, which carries a large portion of the next wave of Devils Lake talent. The younger Storm made a deep tournament run against a host of older teams in Class B. Easton Kraft, Jaxon Strong and Tayven Wiberg are just a few additional names to remember for next year and the years to come, as Devils Lake continues to build upon its success and take this program to greater and greater heights.

But it’s all one season at a time. One pitch at a time, one game at a time and one step after another towards the consistent success that Devils Lake has been striving for.

And it’ll all pick back up, and they’ll do it all over again, in approximately eight months when the 2025 spring season starts.