Most high school baseball coaches have a hard enough time finding one pitcher they feel comfortable calling an ace.
First-year Indian Creek coach Steve Mirizzi has three.
The Braves are about as loaded with arms as a small school could be, and it’s a big reason why they’re so bullish on their chances to build upon the sectional championships they’ve won the past two seasons.
“Knowing the pitching staff down here, that was kind of what caught my eye about the job,” said Mirizzi, who was previously an assistant at Danville. “When I took the job, I knew that our pitching was what we were going to hang our hat on.”
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The marquee name on Indian Creek’s staff coming into the season was junior Trevor Ankney, an all-county performer who is verbally committed to play college baseball at Purdue.
But the team has plenty of depth behind him. In fellow juniors Wyatt Phillips and Dustin Sprong, Mirizzi is confident he has two more aces he can trot out to the mound.
“It helps a lot, having the depth that we have,” Mirizzi said. “Wyatt and Dustin, I’ve argued, are just as good as Trevor.”
Phillips made his season debut a good one, striking out 13 and yielding just one hit in a shutout win against Cloverdale (he hit two of his team-high five home runs in that game for good measure). Sprong got a save and a win in the Braves’ first two games of the year.
Part of what makes Indian Creek’s three aces so dangerous is the speed with which they can throw the ball. Sprong can hit 93 mph on the radar gun, while Ankney tops out around 91 and Phillips can get up to 90 as well.
Velocity, though, is just one piece of the puzzle for each of them. Sprong touts the movement on his pitches, while Ankney said he believes that location is his greatest strength.
“I like to hit the spots,” Ankney said. “I like to hit inside and jam them up on the 0-2 counts and stuff like that.”
Phillips, meanwhile, has four pitches that he feels very comfortable throwing — including a knuckler that both Ankney and Sprong gushed about.
The three of them combine to give the Braves as deep a starting rotation as perhaps any team in the state. Add in a deep stable of relievers — Mirizzi said he’s also comfortable calling upon Jared DeHart, Dylan Sprong, Dawson Read, Devyn Parr or Xavier Ferris for innings — and opponents aren’t going to get many easy at-bats.
Especially since having so many arms available means that none of them have to worry about stretching beyond their limits or conserving energy for another game.
“We can just go as long as we can and do the best we can in a game, and then know we have backup if we need it,” Phillips said.
“It makes it a lot easier,” Dustin Sprong added. “You can trust your teammates because you know they’re just as good as you are.”
That embarrassment of pitching riches will come in particularly handy late in the season — not just in mid-May, when makeup games may help compact an already tight schedule, but in the postseason.
In some cases, Indian Creek may need to play more than one do-or-die game on the same day, and the team likes its chances if it comes down to a war of attrition.
“The further we get into tournaments,” Phillips said, “teams start running out of pitching, but we can continue and keep going.”
The key to the Braves making a deeper tournament run this spring, Mirizzi said, is the offense. He knows that teams are going to struggle to score against his stable of live arms, so if his lineup can consistently push even a modest amount of runs across, those should be enough more often than not.
“Our pitchers can go out there and shut anybody down on any given day,” the coach said. “If we put up three, four, five, six runs a game, I don’t think our pitchers are going to struggle winning ball games for us.
“If we can just get our offense to give our pitching some run support, I really like our chances in every game.”
