FORT MYERS, Fla. – Playoff seedings determined who matched-up with who in Saturday’s first-round of the playoffs at the 17u Perfect Game BCS National Championship, as well as which 10 teams received byes directly into Saturday’s second-round. Any playoff pairings that pop-up after that are strictly results-driven.
And so, as it happened, it was through this results-driven but still somewhat random process that No. 1-seeded 5 Star National Dobbs got paired with No. 16 5 Star Mizell in what promised to be an intriguing second-round contest at the Player Development 5-Plex late Saturday morning.
It was a pairing that had everyone associated with the Warner Robins, Ga.-based organization feeling pretty good about what the program had accomplished here this week with two of the five teams it had entered at the 17u PG BCS – 5 Star Barham, 5 Star Blackie/Bos and 5 Star Weaver are the other three – reaching the playoffs’ Round-of-16.
Perhaps more impressively, it’s the second straight week it’s happened. Five Star National Dobbs – recognized as the organization’s top 17u team – and Five Star Weaver both reached the sweet 16 at the 17u PG WWBA National Championship up at PG Park South-LakePoint in Emerson, Ga., last week.
“It says a lot when Dobbs’ team is going out there and they’re getting the job done like they’re supposed to, but then when you’re looking at the playoffs for the WWBA or the BCS, and it’s not even the same two (5 Star) teams that are in (the final 16),” 5 Star Mizell head coach Hart Mizell said Saturday. “It just kind of shows you the depth of talent from top to bottom (in the organization), and that’s just in one age-group.”
Britt Dobbs, a Five Star partner/CFO and head coach of the 17u 5 Star National Dobbs team, guided this group to a 6-1-0 finish in the north Atlanta suburbs a week ago; the Nationals lost in the round-of-16 to the Central Gators. He appreciates as much as anyone the hard work it takes to advance that far at a PG national championship tournament, but also knows how a team can use it to its advantage.
“Momentum is always brought into your next tournament when you get out of your pool in a previous tournament, and get into the medal round and go all the way to the sweet 16,” he said Saturday. “Nobody likes to lose, but when you go that far you know you’re amongst the top 16 teams in the country.”
As the No. 16 seed, Five Star Mizell had to do a little extra work just to set up the meeting with Five Star National Dobbs: it had to win a first-round game. And the Five Star Mizell’s did that quite handily, knocking off the No. 17 TBSA Patriots 13-5 in five innings.
They totaled nine hits in the win, with Chip Burch contributing a home run, a single, four RBI and two runs scored while Drew Wilkerson singled three times, drove in a run and scored another one.
So, the showdown with the 5 Star Nationals was set, and there was a palpable vibe in the air at the 5-Plex that this was a second-round playoff game that was going to be played with a little bit more emotion than a lot of other second-rounders.
“I’ve been playing for Chain-slash-Five Star my whole life and I’ve never had to play against another (Five Star team) before,” 5 Star National Dobbs 2018 catcher and Mercer commit Leyton Pinckney said. “It was kind of cool but it was kind of nerve-racking at the same time because you’re competing against guys that are wearing the same jersey as you are.
“They’re a great team, and as an organization we just have great players from top-to-bottom,” he continued. “When you play a Five Star team you get a little more nervous because you know you’re going to be playing against good ballplayers.”
No one should have been surprised that the players on both sides were going to be forced to work a little overtime before this one would be decided. National Dobbs pushed across single runs in each of the bottom of the second and third innings – Pinckney and William Bowdoin each drove in runs – but Mizell tied it with a pair of runs in the top of the fourth. Burch had another RBI, bringing his tournament total to nine.
The score was still knotted at two at the end of seven, and the early round playoff tie-breaker went into effect in the eighth: each team started its at-bat with the bases loaded and one out. The Mizell’s first batter grounded into a double-play, so they were retired. National Dobbs’ first batter in the bottom of the eighth drew a walk-off walk, ending the game.
5 Star National Dobbs’ 2017 left-hander Dylan Bonds (Arkansas signee) and the 2018 right-hander Bowdoin (Mercer commit) combined on a six strikeout four-hitter, and allowed only one earned run.
2018 lefty J.T. Larson and 2018 righty Zachary Parish combined on a five-strikeout three-hitter for 5 Star Mizell, with Parish throwing the last 4 1/3 innings of the eight-inning affair; he didn’t allow an earned run on two hits, while striking out four and walking one.
“At the end of the day, when you’ve got that many good players from the same organization playing against each other, you always expect a dogfight,” Pinckney said. “It’s always going to be a battle and you’re going to have to play seven full innings of great baseball. Today, they hung around with us the entire game and we just happened to find a way to win it in the end.”
The victory moved 5 Star National Dobbs into the quarterfinals, where it hoped to keep rolling right into Sunday’s final-four; it’s certainly been a good, fun ride so far. The National Dobbs roster is peppered with top prospects – 18 of those listed on the official roster have committed to NCAA D-I schools – but not all of them made themselves available this week.
It’s been a long, hot and sometimes stormy summer in Georgia and Florida, and participating in back-to-back PG national championship tournaments takes stamina and perseverance. But Coach Dobbs has been extremely proud of the way his team has confronted the inherent challenges head-on, and how it has usually prevailed.
“This team has been playing about the same way all summer; they’re pretty much the same team every day,” he said. “We’re very athletic – we get after it – and we’ve got good pitching and good hitting all the way around. They just go to work and do their jobs, and when you get to this point, there are just so many good teams … and it’s just like anybody’s ballgame. But I like what we’re doing … and this team is even-keeled and just goes out and does it job every day.”
The PG BCS national championship tournaments are structured a little differently than the PG WWBA events as far as pool-play is concerned. A team starts the week in one four-team pool, and in the case of the 17u BCS, the top two finishers in each of those pools after three games was assured a spot in the playoffs.
The pools are then re-shuffled with all the playoff qualifiers grouped together in new pools, and the next three games count only toward seeding. It can test a team’s resolve, but it also puts an added emphasis on winning all six games. By finishing 6-0-0 and grabbing the No. 1 seed, 5 Star National Dobbs obviously took care of its business.
“Every game is very meaningful and you certainly don’t want to take anybody lightly,” Dobbs said. “With our name, the opponent that we’re playing usually throws their (top) guy against us, so you’ve got to come to play every game.
“You have to attack each game if you expect to win each game,” he said. “If you start holding people back and start under-estimating anybody, you’re going to take it on the chin and you ain’t going to be where you want to be.”
Before his team took the field to face the 5 Star Nationals, Hart Mizell told PG that his group of guys was “chomping at the bit” having been given the opportunity to play the program’s premier team. And, he added, he was “looking to go out there and steal a ‘W’” from Dobbs’ team. They came up painfully short in the end, but that took nothing away from his players’ efforts.
“Our guys have played pretty well up to this point,” Mizell said. “The past two days we’ve swung the ball very well and we’ve been very competitive in every game we’ve played this tournament. At the end of a tournament when … everybody’s tired, the bats are what matter, and that’s kind of what’s carried us so far.”
Dobbs knew from the get-go he would see nothing but all-out effort from Mizell’s team, and he would have been disappointed if he’d seen anything less. The 5 Star organization has grown into one of the country’s best because it demands all-out effort and, as a result, no one should be surprised if it continues to have multiple teams playing in the sweet 16 at PG national championship tournaments moving forward.
“We put together (new) teams every year and it’s really cool to see how these teams jell together,” Dobbs said. “The guys on this particular team (National Dobbs) get along so well. There’s a lot of high-profile kids on this team but they don’t act like they are; they act like teammates.
“That’s been pretty cool as a coach to see these kids interact in the dugout and nobody thinks they’re better than anybody else; they just get along great,” he concluded. “It’s been a real positive experience from that standpoint.”