MaxPreps is a respected information and entertainment website about high school sports, and even after the Bellefonte baseball team’s cataclysmic win the PIAA state championship on June 17, MaxPreps still has the Red Raiders ranked the No. 66 team in Pennsylvania.
Wrong.
It’s apparent where the site is coming from, however. Bellefonte’s final record was 16-11. The Raiders were 4-4 at home, 7-7 on the road and 5-0 on neutral fields. The team did not reach the .500 mark until two games into the playoffs, and it was 12-11 after winning the District 6 championship.
Sure sounds like a No. 66 group, but this is a team that won its last nine games — seven of them in the playoffs — and took home the first Pennsylvania state baseball championship in its school’s history.
What happened?
The story of the 2016 Bellefonte team will no doubt be repeated time and again by coaches (and fans) trying to re-energize their teams — no matter how bad things may look. After all, if a team can do that after a miserable 1-7 start, why can’t others?
Everybody knows, though, that turning talk into results is no easy matter, yet Bellefonte found a way to do exactly that.
“They (the Bellefonte players) learned a life lesson real fast,” Raider coach Dan Fravel said. “You just can’t show up and have things work perfect every day. And it didn’t for us for a month. We could have folded it early.
“But seniors, captains, we had a couple sit-downs, and we said it’s not that difficult to do. Just have to refocus, regroup, convince each other that we’re on the same page, and just go back to work every single day.
“Solid D and good pitching. We spend at least half our day in practice just doing that, and we turned it into fun. We take great pride in our defense and it’s a focus of ours. Really, what won us all those games in the playoffs is great defense all the way through.”
The numbers bear out what Fravel said. The Raiders finished with a nine-game win streak, and the most runs any opponent scored was the five that Hollidaysburg put up in the D6 championship.
Hamburg scored four in the state semifinals, but in the other three state-tournament wins, Bellefonte gave up only one run — total.
Compare that to the early part of the season when the Raiders gave up 11 to Central, eight to DuBois and 10 to Penns Valley, all losses.
After that Penns Valley loss, on April 1, Fravel’s teachings seemed to start taking hold. There were still losses — 3-0 to Clearfield, 1-0 to Central Mountain, 3-1 to Philipsburg — but the Raiders were just a hit or two away from perhaps even winning those games.
Then, on April 18, Bald Eagle Area came to visit for a Mountain League contest.
Bellefonte was still just 2-7 at this point, but Dom Masullo pitched a one-hit shutout, Greg Watson drove in a run in the bottom of the fifth inning, and Bellefonte pulled out a 1-0 win.
Bellefonte had just two hits, but the Raiders didn’t commit an error and no BEA runner made it to third base. It was a winning formula that they would use again. And again.
From that point, Bellefonte went 13-4 in the rest of its games. Masullo and Adam Armstrong turned into lights-out starters, and runs against the Raider defense were very hard to come by. Central (8) and State College (7) were the only ones to get more than four.
By the time the playoffs rolled around, Bellefonte expected (and probably wanted) to be involved in close, defense-dominated games in which a big hit or two would make the difference. And they expected to win those games.
After his near no-hitter against BEA, Masullo said, “The one-hitter, or whatever it is, I’m not too concerned. I’m really concerned about the win. Right now we are a team fighting, and we really had to grind it out for this one. But we’ll be all right. I think we are going to hit a streak here where we’ll do really well.”
At that point in the season, Masullo couldn’t possibly have known how prophetic that statement would become.
