Cyclones end season with promising pitching

Midway through the season, Cyclones manager Gilbert Gomez outlined the three ingredients needed to win games: good defense, good pitching and timely hitting. For the Cyclones, all of those ingredients weren’t always present for more than half of their games, and thus the team’s fifth place finish in the South Atlantic League’s North Division.

Although defense and hitting were there for most of the season, most notably there was a lack of timely hitting when the team needed to score winning runs and insurance runs to win games.

However, Cyclone pitching was the team’s bright spot this season, with a number of key performances turned in by the staff. First, Brandon Sproat was one of the first pitchers to get promoted to Double-A Binghamton in May and he distinguished himself as one of the Eastern League’s Pitchers of the Week. He was also selected for the minor league Future Stars All Star Game and later in the season broke Tom Seaver’s record with 11 consecutive strikeouts, earning a promotion to Triple-A.

During mid-season, the staff flourished for a week as rehabbing N.Y. Met and former Cyclone Francisco Alvarez worked behind the plate during an Aberdeen home stand. In one particular game, the pitching trio of Dakota Hawkins, Joey Lancellotti and Josh Cornielly threw the team’s first combined nine-inning no-hitter, which all three credited to Alvarez’s framing and pitch calling for the 3-0 win.

Starting 10 games for the Cyclones, Kade Morris averaged a strikeout per inning over the 57 innings that he pitched after his call-up from St. Lucie in mid-May. In his last appearance, he kept fans on the edge of their seats believing that they were going witness another no-hitter. Morris stole the spotlight, keeping the Rome Emperors from reaching base until the seventh inning of the eventual 12-5 Brooklyn win. However, after earning his fourth win of the season in his center-stage performance, he was traded to the Oakland Athletics for pitcher Paul Blackburn.  

One of the Cyclones’ most consistent pitchers has been Jonah Tong. After joining the team in late April, he pitched 26 scoreless innings before giving up an earned run.  Before the All Star break, he tied his own record of 11 strikeouts in a no-decision outing at Aberdeen. After tying his own record, Tong surpassed 100 strikeouts with 106 Ks consisting of 36 thrown at St. Lucie and 70 thrown in Brooklyn. Upon his promotion to Double-A Binghamton, Tong struck out nine Somerset Patriots in six innings without a hit or a walk for a no-decision in a 2-1 Rumble Ponies win.

Approaching the end of the season, 20-year old pitcher Jack Wenninger finally won his first High-A game after three starts. Pitching at Wilmington, Wenninger earned his first win by tossing a five-inning, eight-strikeout game for a 2-0 win, setting a new Cyclone record of 12 shutouts in a single season. Not only did the Cyclones break their season shutout record, but they added to it with two more with wins of 6-0 and 1-0 over Wilmington during the last week of the season.

In an interesting family footnote, Wenninger’s maternal grandfather and his uncle both played collegiate baseball for Wisconsin. Although not a ball player, Wenninger’s fraternal grandfather has a baseball connection to New York as he served in the same Army unit with Yankees Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford in 1951 during the Korean War.