2016 Baseball Preview

The 2016 spring baseball season will open Saturday for Oran High School.

The Eagles will face two class 3 schools when they travel to Malden and take on the host squad at 11 am and then Caruthersville at 1 pm.

Oran will look to improve on last year's 15-7 mark that saw their season end in the district championship game following an extra-inning defeat to the eventual state champion Bell City Cubs.

This will be he first team that participated in the fall season.  The Eagles went 6-2.

When asked about the benefits of fall baseball, Oran Head Coach Joe Bickings said, "I really feel like it made a huge difference.  We were able to work on some things to better ourselves and also see what we will need to work on come spring time to be a better team.  Also, the kids get just a little more game reps in than other teams that don't have fall baseball. You can't substitute game reps with practice reps."

Having the extra work helped the team replace 4 senior starter from last year.  Bickings said, "Replacing seniors is never an easy task, especially if two were all state (JP & Hunter) and another was all conference (Thomas) and then to add Ben, who was our shortstop and pretty good defensive player. I do however, feel like we are very fortunate here at Oran to be blessed with kids that have talent when it comes to baseball and just in general love the game of baseball. Replacing those seniors from last year won't be easy, but at the same time they aren't coming back and you have to move on. And fall baseball was able to help us do that."

This season, the Eagles have 24 players on the roster. Broken down by class, there are 4 seniors, 5 juniors, 9 sophomores and 7 freshmen.  Sophomore Stewart Legrand is on the team for the first time.  While sophomores Ben Fox and Aaron Glastetter played during the spring of 2015 but not the fall.

Key returning players include, Senior Preston Hahn, who has a career .317 batting average and 5-1 record on the mound with a 2.95 era, will be at 2nd base and will share the pitching duties with sophomore Layne Johnson (7-0, 2.74 era) and sophomore Drew Reischman (1-2 1.05 era)

Reischman is also one of the top returning bats.  Since the spring of 2015 he has a .414 avg with 1 home run and 42 rbi.  Catcher Clay Sauceda is hitting at a .352 clip with 4 homers and 32 runs driven in.

Fortunately for Oran, the weather this year has been much better than last.  Coach Bickings stated, "Practice has been going pretty good.  The kids seem excited to be there and are working hard to try and get better every day.  We have been able to get outside I think 4 times this year so far which is 4 more times than last year. Last year was tough because of all the snow we got and it stayed cold right up until the start of the season."

Here is a copy of this year's roster:

For a printable copy of the roster, click HERE

This year's schedule looks like this:  

For a printable copy of the schedule, click HERE

**Late Update:

The team will participate in a jamboree today at Scott City.  They will face Advance at 4:30 and then the host school immediately following.  Each game will be four innings in length.

Also, the game against Bloomfield, originally scheduled for Tuesday, March 22nd has been rescheduled to Friday, April 29 because of the Wildcat's run in the state basketball tournament.

This will be the first time the schedule has featured a week day bonus game.  Bonus games are when teams play on days that school is not in session.  You can play two games and it counts as only one toward the total allowed.  On the Monday after Easter, March 28,  The Eagles will travel to Ste. Genevieve to play Valle Catholic at 11 am and then Dexter at 1 pm.

Also this season, we will play Portageville.  Recently we had played the Bulldogs as part of a bonus game double-header.  

Oran will participate, once again, in the Notre Dame show case.  The Eagles will play only on Saturday, April 23rd.  They will take on Triad, Il  at 2 pm.  They will face the host team at 6 pm.  Both games will be at Notre Dame Regional High School. 

Also, you can click HERE for a to access the Oran's gamechanger web site.

And, as has been the case for the last several years, the game will be available at 104.1 FM.