On the seventh day they rested…and saw that it was good…because they had just sewed up the league title and it rained cats and dogs on Easter Sunday anyway.
Baseball folks in Hornetville are still buzzing about their high school’s varsity team that finished third in the state in 2010, when the majority of the current players were juniors.
This now-veteran group recently pulled off a feat that will not be duplicated soon – if for no other reason than it required six nice days in a row.
Enumclaw does after all, sit tight against the Cascade Mountains, which makes for some weird spring weather. With the rapidly changing elements around here, that pitcher’s mound can quickly become a slippery slope, literally.
From April 18 to April 23, EHS’s nine engaged in six South Puget Sound League 3A encounters and earned six consecutive victories. That had never been done before in the long history of Enumclaw High baseball.
The final encounter in this amazing race was a Saturday junket to Peninsula High, where the maroon and gold won resoundingly to salt away its third league title in as many years.
The overseer of the Hornet baseball team, Eric Fiedler, is a math teacher at EHS and had performed all the right calculations. He knew a win at Peninsula would assure a league title and had shared the news with his fired-up crew.
To talk about doing it is one thing, but to go out and achieve something like that is astonishing.
The six-day streak was one of the more amazing things he’s been associated with, Fiedler said.
During the same six-game stretch, Hornet senior third baseman Eric Koenig blasted eight home runs, earning him Player of the Week accolades from the largest daily newspaper in the state. The best thing about the timing is that college scouts were rumored to have been in attendance at a couple of the contests and may have been placing some notations next to Koenig’s name.
Don’t worry Eric, chicks aren’t the only ones who dig the long ball.
One might wonder what Koenig had been eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. Had he been munching down bushels of carrots with retina-aiding Vitamin A and poultry – which, according to baseball superstition, can improve performance). Former Boston Red Sox greats Wade Boggs and Ted Williams used to extoll the virtues of consuming chicken and turkey to improve their hitting eye.
This subject fascinates me. I remember the Kansas City Royals’ legendary slugger George Brett saying that he ate a lot of poultry as well. Brett swore that it improved his eyesight to the degree that he could tell what pitch was zooming toward the plate at 100 mph and his keen vision would pick up the rotation of the seams on the horsehide.
Have mercy!
