39 Saints This Season

January 28, 1981

By: Mathias Woener Staff Writer

Despite the snow accumulating over the past few weeks in the greater Joliet area, it’s time to start thinking about baseball and the Fighting Saints! Almost 41 years to the day after our Paul Bartolotta coined “Saint’s baseball looking good” to describe this school’s squad, this year’s iteration of Saints is garnering similar acclaim.

A year ago, the University of St. Francis (USF) baseball team finished a solid 24-20 and an impressive 18-12 in conference play before falling to the top seeded Olivet Nazarene Tigers in the CCAC playoffs. Bartolotta utilized the adage "Some coaches say that experience wins ballgames" in his 1981 hope-filled summation of the Fighting Saints. If that is the case, this year’s pitching staff should win this group a lot of games this season.

Returning from last season on the mound are four starting pitchers and nearly the full array of bullpen arms which should help propel this team. Ryan Daly, Colin Kelly, Angel Sandoval and Nick Villaseñor will be shouldering a lot of the starting pitching duties this season and replacing Michael Beaudoin, along with finding more viable options on the bump. As much as the team would like to maintain 100 percent focus on the season, both the players and coaches are fans of the game. They want to avoid a ninth work stoppage and see baseball played this season. USF baseball assistant coach, Anthony Faron, commented, “I think there is definitely a chance that we see a lockout situation in the MLB this season... it feels especially bad for the players. A lot of them simply want to get out there and play.”

Whether or not there is Major League Baseball this season, it is a guarantee that the St. Francis baseball team will be an exciting watch all spring. We all hope USF baseball leads to lots of victories with less than a foot of snow on the ground.

Pitcher Angel Sandoval #11

The production that this team will have to replace and replicate if they want to have a successful run this spring will be at the plate. There will only be four returning starting bats from a season ago: Noah Kararo, Luke Ketchum, Jake LaSota and John Peterson. However, there are still many opportunities for hitters to step up and produce in other positions. The Saints will have to find new sluggers this spring if they want to make some noise in the playoffs.

This year’s team might be taking the field unopposed without professional counterparts. According to www.theathletic.com, as of now, there are little to no developments in the negotiations between Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Players Association to get baseball on the field this year. This is a recurrent theme in the sport’s history as even when the Encounter’s Paul Bartolotta was writing on the prospects of another Saints’ season. The two sides were bickering about making baseball happen, resulting in a strike in the middle of the season as part of the fifth work stoppage in the sport’s history.