Seahawks Rain on Mineola Baseball Home Opener 9-2

Helms Bohringer doesn’t like mixing words on the baseball diamond. He doesn’t coddle or play nursemaid to the players under him, admitting that most of the time the high school athletes under his dominion don’t always like hearing what he has to say or the critiques of what they have to do in order to win a ballgame.

This past Friday at Mineola’s against H. Frank Carey the veteran coach had predicted how the seventh inning would go: two strikeouts and a groundball.

Needless to say that the Mustangs coach was probably feeling like he could have taken on Karnak the Magnificent and pondering if he should have put money down on the Mega Millions jackpot that night.

“We’ve got to speed it up,” he said of the bat speed. “We’re making this kid look like an all American.”

This kid being Carey senior Harry Smith, as burly a bulldog as you would probably see in a Seahawk uniform and as deadly with his arm as he was with his bat and glove.

“He’s probably the top center-fielder in the league,” Carey coach Marc Hedquist said of the righthander. “Now we’re asking him to pitch this year so we’re very excited about what he can do on the hill. He’s a confident kid.”

Smith had been on the varsity roster for the previous 3 years, primarily as a mopup man.

“We had a good staff last year and he wasn’t needed to pitch,” Hedquist said. “He was just kind of a mop up guy so this year he’s a featured act.”

What Smith featured was his fastball, enough to hold Mineola to 2 runs, fanning eight – including six straight – in a complete game while scoring two runs, belting two triples and getting 3 RBIs to help his own cause for a 9-2 win.

Mustangs leftfielder Chris Weber accounted for the lone runs on the home side, on a fielder’s choice grounder off the bat of secondbaseman Tommy Breslin in the third and an error on Clarke leftfielder Eddie Eymold who misjudged the ball.

“This was a nice breakout win for him,” Hedquist said of Smith’s first-ever mark in the column.

While Mineola “always expects” to make the playoffs, Bohringer had said before the season officially started. “Realistically with the amount of change that we have, we really should be just focused on trying to be a playoff team, focusing on sound fundamentals that will give us a chance to beat some of the better teams that are more experienced.”

Reflecting Friday he put numbers to those words: “if we can go four-and-four, I’d sign up for that right now.”