The Bakersfield College baseball team has been holding night practices in various weather conditions the last few days in preparation for its opening tournament at home.
BC will be hosting a tournament to open the season on Feb. 3 at 7 p.m. against Irvine Valley.
In the meantime, the Renegades are preparing for the fog and damp weather but are hoping not to get it.
“We haven’t yet exposed our players to playing in the foggy, damp, wet, cold weather, and with the potential of that happening Thursday night when we open up, is why we’re starting now,” said head coach Tim Painton.
The Renegades are hoping that last season’s pitching will carry over. The entire pitching staff looks to be the strength for the Renegades as seven of its ten pitchers are returning sophomores this season.
“We return an awful lot on the mound, and it’s been very good throughout the fall for us,” said Painton.
“I think going into this, we return more pitching than we do position players and certainly that should be the strength of our ball club.”
BC’s pitching staff was 14-8 in conference last year and Painton will look to sophomore Bryan Maxwell to head the rotation.
“Maxwell obviously had an outstanding freshman year for us a year ago,” he said. “He’s definitely a guy who is going to start on the mound for us.”
Maxwell pitched in 101 innings while the next closest player to him had 76.
“We also have Marcos Reyna, who was with us two years ago. He sat out last year with an injury, so we’re certainly looking to him. He was a 14th round draft pick two years ago,” he said.
Painton will also be depending on Travis Gifford and Joe Neilson in the rotation. Gifford, a sophomore out of North High, threw out of the bullpen last year and will be asked to do more this season. While Neilson will be going back to the rotation where he was 5-0 as a starter.
“He pitched well for us, pitched on the postseason for us and had some experience, and is a kid that just doesn’t beat himself. So right now it looks like he’ll probably be in the starting rotation for us.”
Rounding out the bullpen will be sophomore Chris Rodriguez, who will be the Renegades’ closer this season.
Rodriguez, a Sanger High graduate, was a back-up third baseman last season who is rather new to pitching.
“What we saw out of Chris was tremendous arm strength and he was behind a little bit offensively last year. We sat down at the end of last season and I was going to approach him with the idea of pitching, but he approached me with it. He’s fairly new at pitching but he’s somebody who will run the baseball up there at 91, 92 miles an hour. So we’re looking at him to be our closer, and I think he will do a very good job in that role,” Painton said.
Along with the returning players in the bullpen, the Renegades bring back infielder David Pennington. Last season, Pennington began the season bouncing around the left side of the infield until he was moved to second in an attempt to get more offense out of the position. This season Pennington could be sharing time at shortstop and the outfield.
“Our depth in the infield is very good, we do not have the same amount of depth in the outfield. Because of Pennington’s versatility and athleticism he’s able to move and do some other things,” he said.
“We have to see how things play out, but today he’s our shortstop.”
This move is a direct result from the players who transferred at the end of last year.
“We lost three very good ones, obviously with [Imaad] Nuriddin, [Andrew] Letourneau, and [Sam] Westendorf. We lost three extremely fast outfielders; three guys that provided an awful lot of offense,” he said.
“We’re just a new look out there with inexperience, and we don’t run as well as we did a year ago.”
Pennington does run well, that’s really the one tool he can take out there that we may lack a bit. But we’ll just have to see, right now he’s our shortstop.”
BC will also have a new catcher behind the plate as Dylan Nasiatka transferred out to Hofstra University. But Painton doesn’t feel that there will be a “feeling-out” period between the pitchers and catchers.
“I don’t think that chemistry is going to be a problem. We have Nathan Ketelhut behind the plate, who was with us last year. Brock Allen was a redshirt for us last year, so he’s been around our pitching staff. Brian Haney is another returning catcher, who just broke his ankle so he’s out.
But I don’t think we lose a whole lot from a pitcher-catcher standpoint. We lose a lot offensively with Dylan Nasiatka leaving, but I think the defensive aspect of the catching position is in good hands,” he said.
Another task the Renegades have is to fill the heart of the order after the departures of Nasiatka and Art Charles.
“If we open up tonight, which we don’t, freshman Elijah Trail would be somewhere in the lineup. He really, really played well from about the middle of the fall on. Another would be redshirt freshman, Mike Spingola, who had gone out of town and came back.
“Jacob Nielson will be somewhere in the middle of that lineup. They’re all guys who just give you consistent at-bats.”
Painton also spoke on the different dynamic the offense looks to be.
“I don’t know that we’re going to be the same type of offensive team, we don’t have the speed that we had last year. But I think we do other things better than last year,” he said.
Every new season is exciting; we’re excited to get it going,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of new faces. We lost pretty much every position player that started every day for us a year ago. But that’s the challenge with any new season.
“I think everybody is excited to get going and get on the field and see somebody in a different uniform. We’re tired of intersquading and seeing each other.”