Jet Setters

For Vauxhall Baseball Academy players Jaden Griffin, Damiano Palmegiani and Martin Vincelli-Simard, you just hope their suitcase-packing skills are as good as their baseball abilities.

The trio barely had a chance to return to Alberta from Florida – where they suited up for Baseball Canada’s Junior National Team (JNT) during a hectic 12-day stretch of spring training action against MLB prospects – before they were headed south again for tournament play in Las Vegas.

Vauxhall’s team name – Jets – was never more appropriate.

Keeping Score at Home

Box scores are full of loads of information, and while they never lie, they never tell the whole story either.

Take the recent box score from the Toronto Blue Jays spring training game against the Canadian Junior National Team (JNT), for example.

It will tell you that JNT shortstop Cesar Valero stepped to the plate in the top of the first inning against starting pitcher Marcus Stroman and struck out to end the inning.

What it won’t tell you is how smooth and clean Valero’s swing is or how nasty Stroman’s breaking ball can be. It also won’t tell you that Valero, an Okotoks Dawgs Academy product, is just 16 years old, while Stroman is a 26-year-old veteran of four MLB seasons.

Lucky Charms

You could call it the luck of the Irish that Adam Macko ended up in Alberta.

The left-handed pitching prospect did indeed play baseball in Ireland in 2012 and 2013, winning a Little League championship that first year and finishing second the next.

And if it’s true that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, than you can certainly call Adam lucky. But that seems rather dismissive of all the hard work that he put it in before arriving in Canada … and since he got here.

Baseball in Another World

When it comes to baseball, Bermuda will not be mistaken for the Dominican Republic anytime soon.

But with the help of the Baltimore Orioles’ 2017 second-round pick Adam Hall and some bat-and-glove loving Albertans, there is hope that the sport will grow on the island in the years ahead.

Ian Wilson explores some unlikely baseball ties between Alberta and Bermuda …