The Park Orioles suffered a tough loss to the Edina Hornets May 22, with a final score of 13-1. With Edina being the No. 1 or No. 2 seed in the section and Park being the No. 3, Park’s strategy was to rest their pitchers and starters, with this being the last game before the section tournament. The reasoning was to hide their strategies and to make sure the team was at full strength going into the postseason.
Senior Jack Mobley hit his first Varsity home run to secure Parks’ only run in the game. He said Park struggled to compete during the game, but there were moments that showed promise nonetheless.
“The score wasn’t great, (we) kind of got smoked,” Mobley said. “All the boys had fun and we (had a) couple of good hits here and there to keep our morale up.”
Junior Griffin Hanson said the weather conditions and competition made the game difficult, but this game showed how the team could stay positive. He said the game gave the opportunity for non-starter players to have more playing time.
“The weather was not ideal and we were facing a really good team as well,” Hanson said. “I’m glad that we were able to stay a little bit positive in the rain. The guys were keeping it loose, making sure we’re not yelling at each other for making mistakes, so I was happy to see that. It was good to have the younger players coming up today, just helping out, making sure they’re seeing reps and they’re seeing the field, so they know what the environment’s like for next year.”
Varsity head coach Danny Bissonnette said his goal for this game was to prevent Edina from seeing the team’s strongest assets and to get players who don’t get as many in-game minutes more involved to make sure the whole team is prepared for the section tournament.
“It’s an interesting situation we’re in today, where this game doesn’t matter towards our section seeding,” Bissonnette said. “We’re kind of locked in the number three (seed) spot, and (Edina) are in the top two, so we weren’t trying to show them our pitching. We were able to get some guys that hadn’t gotten a lot of innings some experience, which is nice. We’re getting some guys at-bats that they haven’t had, just to get ready as much as we can to get other guys experienced before we go into the most important part of the season. The game ended in an unfortunate result, but we were able to get some guys at-bats and some guys innings on the mound.”
According to Mobley, the team needs to forget this performance in terms of just the score and focus instead on their next matchups in order to succeed in future games.
“I’d say the mentality (going into sections) would be to flush this game, move on to the next one and attack the next team we face because in sections we’re not going to be able to win if we can’t move on from mistakes,” Mobley said.
Hanson said this game was crucial in giving some of the younger players confidence and experience, since they will be included in the roster for sections.
“This was a huge game for building up our team,” Hanson said. “We had a couple of JV guys coming up today, and I think all of us being together as one unit, rather than two different squads coming together, is super important, just knowing that we have a guy behind us if we need them.”
Bissonnette said with the season coming to an end, the team needs to mentally reset and reflect on the past successes to prepare them for sections. He said the team should try to learn from this game to apply that experience to future matchups.
“When we zoom out a little bit and not just focus so much on this game, but on the week as a whole, we played some good baseball,” Bissonnette said. “We beat a really good Chanhassen team. We beat an Armstrong team that was playing really, really well. Then we had a great game with Waconia, who’s a very strong team. Hopefully, that preps us for the section tournament. Now we’ll learn from what went wrong in this game, what went right and we’ll apply that to our practice leading up to sections.”
