Wildcat Baseball Bidding For State Final Four

By the looks of things midway through the 2017 season, the Wharton High baseball team was nothing special.

It was, however, nothing that a few lineup tweaks and a bolt of confidence couldn’t fix.

After back-to-back losses to Freedom and Newsome dropped the Wildcats’ record to 8-8 on April 6, the team has been, well, perfect.

“We saw everything was kind of going downhill,’’ said senior shortstop Drew Ehrhard. “We kind of looked at each other at one practice, and just decided it was time to pick things back up.”

The Wildcats have now won 10 straight games, including a second straight Class 8A, District 4 title and regional playoff wins over Ocoee and Ocala Forest.

Tonight, the Wildcats travel to Tallahassee to take on Lincoln High in the regional final, with the winner advancing to the state final four starting June 2.

Lincoln, ranked No. 6 in the state by MaxPreps, has won 16 straight games, but face a Wharton team that seems to be peaking.

The recipe for the Wildcats’ success has been right out of the baseball handbook: great pitching, solid defense and clutch hitting.

In the 7-6 extra-inning win over Ocoee in the Region 8A-1 quarterfinal, the Wildcats got a tremendous relief outing from senior Aaron Cohn (6 innings, 2 hits, 1 run and a season-best 7 strikeouts), two hits from Ehrhard, two RBI from senior catcher Zach Sirois and a walk-off sacrifice fly from Brian Baughman to win the game in the eighth inning.

“And, that was not a routine fly ball,’’ said coach Scott Hoffman. “That was a missile.”

The Wildcats improved to 18-8 with the win over Ocala Forest a week later, as junior leftfielder Ricky Viloria singled in Duncan Pastore in the bottom of the seventh in a 6-5 win.

Wharton has outscored opponents 78-17, and 11 of those runs surrendered coming in the last two games.

“We always thought that If we get hot, we feel good about our chances,’’ Hoffman says.

Not too many of the ‘Cats have been hotter than Ehrhard, who will play next season for the Division II powerhouse University of Tampa Spartans.

Wharton’s on-field leader is hitting .438 with nine doubles, four homers and 24 RBI, all team and career highs.

He has played every inning of every game for four years, and this season, he has hit safely in 22 of the team’s 26 games.

“Drew is the most unbelievable player we’ve had here,’’ said Hoffman, as he watched his star blast three batting practice pitches over the centerfield fence at a recent practice. “He’s a dream kid as an athlete, academically and with his character.”

He has not been alone in putting up big numbers for the Wildcats.

Pitchers Austin Appel, Pastore and Cohn also have played big roles in Wharton’s charge down the stretch. When the year began, pitching was one of the team’s biggest question marks.

However, Appel stepped up to be the team’s senior ace, and is 7-1 with a 1.81 ERA.

Pastore fit into the relief role successfully, with a 0.93 ERA, and in eight appearances, he has allowed hits in just two of them.

In arguably the team’s biggest regular season win of the season, Pastore struck out four in two innings to get the victory over highly-touted Plant, 2-1.

“I definitely think it was the Plant game that turned everything around,’’ Ehrhard says. “We played some competitive games before that, but the game against Plant was to see what we were really made of. After that, we knew that everyone who steps on the field in front of us, we have a chance to beat.”

Cohn, a Fairleigh Dickinson University (in Teaneck, NJ) signee, has turned in some fantastic late-season performances as well. In his six appearances (including three starts) during the winning streak, Cohn has gone a perfect 6-0, allowing just 13 hits and two earned runs in 27.2 innings (for a tidy 0.50 ERA) while striking out 28.

While the Wildcats thrived with great pitching and hitting from Ehrhard, junior Leo Alfonzo (.307) seniors Ricky Nieves (.328, 16 RBI) and Clayton Coringrato (.275, 17 RBI), Hoffman was expecting another player to surprisingly emerge in the late season run.

“One of you guys will be the difference maker,’’ he told them at a practice. “I don’t know who it is, but it will be one of you.”

It turned out to be Sirois. In the past six games, the team’s catcher is 12-for-24 (after going 11-for-61 the first 19 games) with seven RBI (compared to four the rest of the season).

“He’s emerging, he hasn’t done that all year,’’ Hoffman said. “He’s a different person.”

And against Ocala Forest, it was Viloria getting his first game-winning hit to lift the Wildcats, who now appear to be a different team, hoping to make it back to the State final four for the first time since 2012.

“This is a great group,’’ Hoffman says, touting the team’s work ethic and 3.4 cumulative grade-point-average, second in the county. “We get overlooked a lot. The newspapers like to talk about the same schools all the time. Find another school that has played for the district championship five of the last six years, and won it three times. There aren’t many. I think they think because we’re in New Tampa (we can’t play), but every time it’s tournament time, we’re there.”