Kent Bewley

As spring is blooming ever closer in other parts of the nation, it has already arrived in Southern California, where baseball players are lucky to have a mostly calm climate to play their favorite game in. While the rest of the country has to deal with stormy skies and inclement weather, the Golden State has some of the finest weather for outdoor sports and baseball is near the top of the list for California kids and young adults to play when the calendar draws near to the Spring Equinox.  

The young college ballplayers enrolled at Concordia University Irvine are fortunate enough to have their own ballpark on the campus they attend and to play the sport they love in their school’s athletic conference. The Pacific West Conference(or the PacWest), under the banner of NCAA Division II, features a mixture of member institutions that hail from two of the best states to be located in weather-wise during almost any time of the year in Hawaii and California. 

For the Concordia Golden Eagles, they play a mostly weekend schedule where doubleheaders occur on Fridays and Saturdays during the months of February through April in the spring semester of their school year.  

The manager of the team, Joe Turgeon, does his best to make sure that his team’s players are ready to play after weekly practices and physical preparation along with balancing their class schedules and homework assignments with their responsibilities of representing the university they play for.  

Turgeon says the hardest position to play for a college baseball player is the catcher behind home plate because “there is so much asked out of them, from understanding the entire pitching staff and what makes them tick, to knowing every defensive play and where everybody on the field is supposed to be.”  

Most NCAA Division I baseball players who are not drafted by a big league team in their high school years don’t make it to the major leagues. The odds are even longer for Division II ballplayers, who are lucky to have the opportunity to compete on a roster at the collegiate level.  

Out of all the high school baseball prospects who are accepted to play and learn at an NCAA member institution, there is only a 2.4% chance for those ballplayers to make it onto a Division II roster and the same statistic holds true for Division I rosters. The probability of an NCAA player being drafted or signed by a major league team is only a meager five percent.  

In spite of these statistical odds impeding the possibility of college ballplayers fully living out their childhood dreams, the young men of Division II baseball programs still show up to play the game they love on sunny and overcast days alike.  

The Golden Eagles of Concordia played well in their afternoon game on Sat, Mar 14 as they defeated the Biola University Eagles 11-1 in a mercy rule seven-inning game. They were powered by a two-way player named Wyatt Madison, who was the starting pitcher and batted third in the batting order.

Madison threw six shutout innings while getting on base four times and scored one of the game-ending runs on a three-run shot by second baseman Dylan Knowles. It was a fine day at the ballpark for the Golden Eagles, who had to turn around and play another game to wrap up their weekend of competitive spirit.