Not only were there two teams in the city with storied reputations – the Cardinals and Canucks – both squads regularly fought for not only league gold, but provincial titles on the regular. In fact, it got to the point it was almost strange of one of the two teams wasn’t outright winning everything.
But as time passed, so did the calibre of baseball in the city. Eventually, AAA baseball went away as more athletes gravitated to other sports, and local teams opted to take the field at the AA level in order to face closer competition.
It’s taken half a decade, but local teams are starting to break into the higher echelon once again – and for the first time in years, there’s an 18U AAA team taking the field at Ross Wells Park.
The results haven’t been the greatest – their most recent outings were 5-1 and 9-6 losses to the Regina White Sox, dropping their record to 0-6 for the season – but given the overall youth of the team and the improvement they’ve seen already, head coach Ray Wareham is optimistic for the future.
“We’re definitely playing better lately, we just get put into some pressure situations and with the inexperience we have, we make some crucial mistakes at bad times,” Wareham said. “But we’re playing better than we were at the start of the year and that’s encouraging.”
It certainly doesn’t help who they’ve been facing through their first six contests. Five of their first six games have come against the defending SPBL champion White Sox, who include a handful of provincial-team calibre players in their line-up.
“So we’ve been thrown into the fire right away,” Wareham said with a rueful laugh. “It’s the experience of just not being used to that level. That guys I had last year with the 15Us, it was their first AAA experience, and now they’re 18U and they’re in their first year of AAA and it’s tough. We don’t have a lot of depth pitching-wise but the guys that threw this past weekend threw well. It’s just the mistakes at bad times and they took advantage them.”
That’s how you learn, though. And getting the game back to the highest level it can will take time, especially if the lofty heights of the past are to be reached.
“If you want to get better and develop baseball in Moose Jaw again, we need to play the best teams to do that,” Wareham said. “We knew that this year was maybe going to be ugly at times with such a young group, but you’re not going to learn unless you’re at that level. It’s not fun losing, but in the same breath we’re getting better as we’re going and improving each day and the kids are working hard.”
Of course, there’s always the elephant in the room – the Canucks would have had a few games against other teams, most specifically the Swift Current 57’s, but the COVID-19 outbreak in the southwest of the province forced the cancellation of those contests and much of the 57's season. The Canucks have been able to schedule exhibition games, including last week against the Regina Athletics, for example, but the pandemic looms large over all the proceedings.
“Just the fact we’re able to get some ball in this year is nice,” said Wareham. “These guys weren’t expecting to get ball in at all, they’ve been sitting around so long. But they keep working, practices have been good, they’re working hard. We have 12 or so games left and we’ll see how it goes.”
