PORT ANGELES — No need to wait until the Fourth of July to see some fireworks.
With the 13th annual Dick Brown Memorial Firecracker Classic coming to Port Angeles’ Civic Field today through Monday, baseball fans can see plenty on the diamond the next four days.
Wilder Baseball will host what has become an annual showcase of sorts for the elite club this holiday weekend, playing the final game each night leading into Monday’s 6 p.m. championship.
If history is any indicator, the North Olympic Peninsula all stars should be in that game, too.
Not only has Wilder reached the championship in each of the previous 12 tournaments, it’s won 11 of them.
Of course, this is also the same team that started off this season with five straight home losses.
So Wilder head coach Rob Merritt isn’t about to take anything for granted.
“We haven’t played in front of our home fans in a while,” said Merritt, in his fifth year leading the Senior Babe Ruth Baseball team.
“When we did we were 0-5, so it will be interesting to see how much better we got.”
The eight-team Firecracker tournament, set a few weeks before the postseason begins, is traditionally a launching point for the Wilder program each summer.
The event takes on a different meaning this year, with Wilder (5-7 overall) set to host the Senior Babe Ruth Pacific Northwest Regional tournament July 20-24 at Civic Field.
“Normally, it’s just another tournament,” Merritt said of the Firecracker.
“Obviously we want to protect our home turf, but this year it’s kind of a little more important because we’re playing the regional tournament here.
“My whole thing with this year was play as much as we could on our own field and it was just another day at the park [when regionals roll around].”
Unfortunately for Wilder, game cancellations kept the team from playing the full home schedule Merritt had planned.
Now the team has just the four games this weekend, beginning with tonight’s 7 p.m. contest against the Victoria Mariners, to get more acquainted with playing in front of the home faithful.
If Wilder can somehow replicate what it’s done on the road the past two weeks when it went 5-2, that shouldn’t be much of a problem.
“I think a lot of us just put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” Wilder infielder Isaac Yamamoto of Sequim said of the early season struggles.
“Most of the people are going to college like Cody [Sullivan] and A.J. [Konopaski], and I was trying to find a college spot. I think we were just putting a lot of pressure on ourselves and trying to do a lot more rather than rely on the team.
“Realizing that we as a team have to perform well and play well is the one thing that we were doing [the last two weeks].
“That’s been a huge key to our success these last couple of games.”
More than anything, the biggest change has come at the plate.
After averaging just 5.0 runs per game in the team’s first five contests, Wilder has scored 60 runs in seven games.
That included 29 runs in four games during the team’s second-place showing at the Post 9 Showcase Classic in Salem, Ore., last weekend.
Sullivan (Port Angeles) came alive in a big way at that tournament, coming up with a pair of two-hit games while also hitting one home run.
Meanwhile, teammate Easton Napiontek (Port Angeles) submitted a two-home run game and could be seen blasting bomb after bomb out of Civic Field during practice Wednesday.
If Wilder’s pitching staff — led by Sullivan, A.J. Konopaski (Port Angeles), Napiontek and Austin McConnell (Chimacum) — can find its footing, Wilder ought to be in good shape.
“In that Salem tournament we were in a tough bracket, and the kids responded,” Merritt said.
“When we started out the year, we were almost kind of anemic [on offense]. Our timing was bad, and we’ve been just hitting 45 minutes to an hour every night.
“We noticed [a turnaround] at about Aberdeen,” when Wilder swept three games by a combined score of 31-6.
This weekend’s tournament features many of the same teams from last year.
Competing in the Blue Division with Wilder will be the Victoria Mariners, Kitsap American Juniors (North Kitsap) and Sequim Baseball.
On the other side in the Red Division are the Kitsap American Seniors (North Kitsap), Blaze Baseball (South Kitsap), the Victoria Eagles and Coquitlam Reds (eastern Vancouver suburb).
While Wilder could be considered the favorite to win its pool, the Red Division will likely come down to the Kitsap American Seniors and Blaze Baseball, a team that swept Wilder earlier this year.
“We’re heading in the right direction,” Merritt said. “We’re not there yet, but I feel like we have three weeks to get ourselves prepared.
“We have 14 guys right now, and it’s going to take all 14 of us to get it done for our team to accomplish what we want to accomplish.
“We need all 14 guys heading in the same direction.”
