GLENDALE, Ariz. – Throughout a 17-year Major League Baseball career that included an All-Star Game appearance and a Silver Slugger Award while playing with the Detroit Tigers in 1998, Damion Easley learned the importance of going to work every day and putting forth your absolute best effort.
Now the owner and operator of Glendale-based Warriors Baseball Academy (WBA) – which he established in 2010 two years after retiring from the big leagues – Easley wants to see the same sort of effort out of the young men he now mentors.
He was in attendance Friday morning at the Camelback Ranch MLB spring training complex for this weekend’s 16u PG WWBA West Memorial Day Classic with his WBA 2018 team that is here as the event’s defending champion. Nearly every player that was on last year’s title team is back this year, and Easley doesn’t hesitate when asked about this group’s secret to success.
“They compete; it’s that simple,” he said under a cloudless sky in the West Valley of the Sun. “You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don’t know how to compete, if you don’t know how to deal with failure, if you don’t know how to pick up the next guy, it won’t work.”
Playing as a 15u team in 2015, the Warriors 2018 motored to the 16u PG WWBA Memorial Day Classic championship with a 6-0 record. They outscored their three pool-play opponents by a combined count of 28-3 before dousing the Deserts Cats (Peoria, Ariz.) 12-2 in the quarterfinal round of the playoffs and the NorCal Young Guns 15u (Escalon, Calif.) 7-3 in the semis.
They trailed MWBA Horns Select (Cottonwood Heights, Utah) 3-1 after six innings in the championship game, only to explode for six runs in the top of the seventh to batten down a 7-3 victory. Jacob Robson delivered a two-run single, Jack Silverman an RBI single and Antonio Brito a sacrifice fly as part of the game-winning outburst.
Robson, Silverman and Brito – all in the class of 2018 along with each one of their WBA 2018 teammates – were three of nine Warriors named to last year’s All-Tournament Team. The others were Jayce Easley (Damion Easley’s son and an Oregon State commit), Griffin Hampton, Sasha Sneider, Dominik Demarbiex, Reid McLaughlin and Jonathan Ornelas; all are back this weekend.
“We just had a really good run,” WBA 2018 head coach John Navarro said Friday morning. “Our bats were alive that weekend, we played good defense and the pitching did pretty well. These guys are pretty solid, to be honest with you. They’re young – they’re only sophomores; they’ll be juniors next year – and they’ve got a lot of talent, and they’ve got a lot of work still to (do). But they are a very talented group of guys.”
It was the team’s youth that raised so many eyebrows a year ago. Most of the other teams in the field were true 16u squads, including Warriors Baseball Academy 2017 which finished 1-2-1 at the tournament. Navarro indicated he wasn’t all that shocked by the WBA 2018’s title trot.
“In our age group and maybe even a year older, we can always compete,” he said “We won’t always win every game and it might get ugly sometimes, but all we do is compete. Inning after inning, pitch after pitch, we’re just going to compete and see where the chips fall.”
There’s that word again: “compete.” Easley brought the core of this group, including his son, together in 2010 when they were 9 and 10 years old and he’s always preached to them the need to go out and compete. Warriors Baseball Academy has four teams now, starting with another 9-and-under group, and the message to all four remains the same. That message resonates because the young players sense Easley is sincere in his efforts.
“I believe in youth baseball and making it fun at that level; teaching them the fundamentals at a younger age and building relationships,” he said. “I like working with the younger guys because you get to build some relationships and you get to see these guys start out their careers. … We all have familiarity with each other, and it’s about building relationships with these kids and letting them know that we care.”
That familiarity and relationship-building provides the foundation to the Warriors’ success. The 14-man roster lists 12 separate high schools from all around the Valley but the players have completed their high school seasons and are focused on what lies ahead. “They’ve all said they’re happy to be back and are looking forward to the summer, and rightfully so,” Easley said. “They’re talented and they know how to play to win.”
Being possessed of talent is paramount to winning championships but there is much more involved, at least in Easley’s view. He sees the long-lasting benefits of learning how to be a good person and a good teammate and taking great satisfaction from just being in the company of your teammates. The Warriors 2018 clearly enjoy one another and care about their teammates, which has made it easy for them to stick together year after year.
“This is a close-knit group. They’re all friends, they all get along in every way,” Easley said. “They can get on each other and not take it personally; they all have the same drive.”
The Warriors 2018 reached back and found a little bit of magic left over from last year’s championship run during Friday morning’s 16u PG WWBA WMD Classic opener. Trailing the Southern Arizona Prospects (Tucson) 2-1 heading into the bottom of the sixth inning, they tied the game with an unearned run pushed across by a Prospects’ fielding error. They then plated what proved to be the winning run when Jayce Easley scored on a fielder’s choice groundout from Silverman; Hampton had two of WBA 2018’s four hits.
The win was the seventh straight over two successive Memorial Day weekends at this event for the Warriors, but Damion Easley insists that winning has always been secondary in his business model. He believes in what he calls “the process of winning” where he and his coaches, like Navarro, teach the young players how to become better hitters, pitchers, defenders and base-runners; the winning will follow.
“We teach the how-tos and then we hold them accountable to what they can master,” Easley said. “When they do that as a group collectively they win, because they have talent; when they don’t, we struggle. We try to make sure we point out why it was a struggle or why it came easy to us that day. You’re going to have to deal with adversity and it’s very important that you just keep going, you keep battling, you keep fighting and you keep trying to do the right things when things aren’t going your way.
He continued: “It’s easy to play when things are going you way but when you’re (up against) a team that is just as talented or even more talented than you and they’re winning a few more battles than you are, that’s when you really get to test that mental toughness.”
Damion Easley’s 17-year big league career started in 1992 with the California Angels and concluded in 2008 with the New York Mets; the primary second baseman enjoyed stops with the Detroit Tigers, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Florida Marlins and Arizona Diamondbacks in between. He played prep baseball at Lakewood (Calif.) High School and the Angels selected him in the 30th round of the 1988 MLB Amateur Draft out of Long Beach (Calif.) City College.
He has already had a lifetime’s worth of experiences on a baseball field and he gladly shares them with his young players. If the results on the field are any indication, the players have learned the most valuable of all lessons – how to compete.
“First and foremost, they’re very receptive,” Easley said. “They take everything I say to heart and they try to use all their ability to implement whatever I ask them to do. My biggest thing is to compete; my biggest thing is to try win every pitch.”