Whiteland junior pours heart into baseball

Sixty feet, 6 inches is greater than 19 feet, 9 inches.

Even while he was busy draining 3-point shots for Whiteland all winter on the basketball court, Luke Helton was focused at least as much on chucking balls from the pitcher’s mound as he was on firing from behind the arc.

“He’s a baseball junkie,” Whiteland baseball coach Scott Sherry said. “He loves it. He loves being out here. He’s the kid who will say, ‘Hey, I want 10 more ground balls; I want 10 more swings,’ all the time.

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“He just loves the game and loves to be out here. It’s a joy to coach kids like that.”

Helton, a junior, is back in his happy place as the defending county champion Warriors prepare to open their season next weekend with a pair of games up north at Griffith.

Though he was a valuable contributor on the basketball court, averaging 4.3 points and making 25 3s off the bench, Helton’s milieu is the diamond, where he was an all-county pick last year as a pitcher and shortstop. He batted .325 with 19 runs batted in.

Helton’s future in the game, though, will most likely be determined by how he fares on the mound. He combines decent velocity — his fastball tops out around 86 or 87 miles per hour — with the ability to paint the corners of the strike zone and dance around bats.

In 462/3 innings last season, Helton struck out 40 and walked just 14. He finished with a 6-3 record and a 0.90 earned-run average.

“It just depends on the night,” he said. “Sometimes I’m throwing pretty hard. Usually I like to finesse. … I throw pretty hard, but it’s not hard enough to overpower everyone.”

“He just has command,” Sherry agreed. “He controls parts of the plate inside and out, throws multiple pitches for strikes.”

Even during basketball season, Helton was honing his craft; when basketball practices wrapped up, he would head straight for offseason baseball workouts. Any time that wasn’t spent in the gym qualified as baseball season to him.

“I stay the same during basketball season as I would in the fall,” Helton said. “I just go after (basketball) practice.”

The hope is that such dedication will translate into even greater success this spring. Whiteland suffered a disappointing loss in the sectional final last season and would like to atone for that while also chasing county and Mid-State Conference finals.

If the Warriors achieve any or all of those goals, it’ll likely be because they followed the lead of their ace, who lives and breathes America’s pastime even when he’s giving most of his time to another one.

“He’s poised and just doesn’t want to fail,” Sherry said. “He wants to compete and enjoys it and thrives in that atmosphere, and you get that combination of stuff, you’ve got a good one.”