South Kitsap baseball scratching, clawing for season turnaround

PORT ORCHARD -- There's not much South Kitsap baseball coach Marcus Logue can do about wet weather being a nuisance in the spring. But when it comes to discouraging a gaggle of geese from making a mess of the team's field, Logue relies on a specific canine deterrent.

There's a coyote helping the Wolves.

Not a real coyote, of course. Just a life-sized decoy that keeps geese from getting too comfortable on the grass. South Kitsap's softball team also uses a coyote decoy on its field for the same purpose — trying to scare geese away.

Logue had to laugh when thinking about the first time he employed coyote decoys a couple years ago. The coach's phone began blowing up with messages from alarmed friends who believed intruders had found their way onto South Kitsap's field.

"Hey, there's dogs on your field!" Logue said.

The decoys, Logue pointed out, aren't perfect. Just like baseball, some days are better than others.

As one of the few high school teams in West Sound playing games over spring break, South Kitsap's days are looking a little bright now than they did in the month of March, when the Wolves opened the season with seven consecutive losses.

While six of the team's defeats came on the road, the results didn't paint a pretty picture: four shutouts, seven total runs scored, 21 total hits on offense.

"Our pitching was keeping us in games," South Kitsap junior Payton Moritz said. "We just couldn't string hits together."

Despite the mounting losses, Logue said South Kitsap's coaching staff prioritized practice habits over results.

"These kids work really hard. Six days a week, three hours a day," said Logue, who led the Wolves to a Class 4A state championship in 2015 after second-place state finishes in 2013 and 2014. "I think sometimes even they forget about the losing. They are practicing so hard and they forget about the losing."

Losing hasn't been much of an issue for the Wolves over the past week. The team picked up its first win on March 29, prevailing 6-5 over Bethel at home. South Kitsap followed up with a 9-5 victory over Capital on April 1 in a game played at Cheney Stadium, home of the Tacoma Rainiers. The team suffered its fifth shutout loss on Monday, losing 9-0 at Sumner, but rebounded on Tuesday with its most convincing victory of the season, an 8-1 home triumph over Graham-Kapowsin.

Moritz pitched a complete game, allowing seven hits while striking out six. His lone run allowed was unearned as South Kitsap dropped a pop fly in the seventh inning. Offensively, the Wolves only finished with five hits, but scored all eight runs in the first three innings and took advantage of three errors by the visitors.

Sophomore Santi Herrera finished 1-for-3 with three RBI, delivering the biggest hit of the game in the first inning with a two-out, two RBI double to right center. It's the type of hit the Wolves weren't producing a few weeks ago.

"Once we got our first win, we've kind of picked it up," Moritz said. "You've just got to know your role and not try and do too much."

South Kitsap (3-8) still finds itself tied with Bethel for eight place in the nine-team South Puget Sound League. With two more games scheduled this week, home against Emerald Ridge on Wednesday and away at Graham-Kapowsin on Friday, the Wolves have more opportunities to put their early-season skid behind them.

It might be a struggle for South Kitsap to compete with the league's heavyweights like Olympia, Puyallup and Curtis, whose rosters are sprinkled with Division I college talent. But like that coyote decoy protecting the team's field, the Wolves hope they can do their job more often than not in the second half of the season.

"We should be winning the games we should win," Logue said, "and we've got to try to scratch and claw and get a few ones that will be tough."

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: South Kitsap baseball working hard after a slow start to season