Glenville-Emmons holds pair of aces
Published 2:17 am Wednesday, March 24, 2010
One has started since his freshman year, the other gave up six earned runs in 42 innings last season and together they give the Glenville-Emmons baseball team a devastating 1-2 punch on the mound.
Senior Jon Mittag has started for the Wolverines the past three seasons and earned all-conference honors each season. He’s served as a work horse for Glenville-Emmons and finished last season with a 2.84 ERA and struck out 46 in 37 innings in going 5-1.
Junior Tyler Woodside finished 3-3 last season and had an ERA of 1 in his first full varsity season on the mound. Woodside struck out 47 in 42 innings and walked just five batters.
“I don’t think there’s going to be many teams that are going to hit Jon and Woody consistently hard,” said Wolverines head coach Louie Toulouse. “I think those two guys are going to prove that they’re going to be as good or better than any pitchers in our conference in this area.”
Provided Glenville-Emmons doesn’t have too many games bunched together Mittag and Woodside give the Wolverines a strong chance to improve on 9-11 season and a second-place finish in the Southeast Conference.
“It will be hard for other teams to beat us,” Woodside said. “Every day we’ll have an ace on the mound.”
That may be the case, but Woodside knows as well as anyone that the defense behind him will have to improve this season. Part of the reason he went just 3-3 was because of fielding errors.
The Wolverines had a .894 fielding percentage as a team last season and made 64 errors in the field.
“Tyler probably could have won three, four more games for us if we’d had played defense,” Toulouse said. “It seemed like every time he pitched we made errors.”
Glenville-Emmons returns six starters from last season, including the team’s leading hitter in junior Spencer Kral. Kral hit .354 with 13 RBIs and two home runs.
Mittag hit .345 with 11 RBIs and had an on-base percentage of .567.
While the Wolverines have some hitters returning Toulouse said the team needs to still find better situational hitting.
“Last year it seemed like every time we had a crucial situation we’d strike out,” Toulouse said. “We’d have the bases loaded nobody out and we’d strike out or hit a pop up in the infield. We just have to learn to be a little more consistent.”
Glenville-Emmons has conference title aspirations, but Toulouse said that is not the main goal after the Wolverines lost both games in the subsection playoffs last season.
“Winning the conference is one of our goals, but obviously that’s not the main goal because last year we did well in the conference,” Toulouse said. “We got to subsections, (and) we did absolutely nothing. Those have to lead us to something better in the postseason.”