The Newcastle High School Racers baseball team — under the direction of first-year head coach Jarod King — is two wins away from playing in its first Class 4A State tournament since 2019.
The Racers (29-8) went 4-1 in the Regional tournament last week and beat Harrah twice, 10-0 Thursday and 9-3 Friday, to claim the Regional title and advance to Super Regionals.
“We did swing the bat really well throughout the Regional tournament. I think we hit five home runs in the (five) games we played. We pitched it pretty well,” King said. “I think we gave ourselves a pretty good chance to advance to the State tournament.”
The seventh-ranked Racers will host a three-game series against No. 10 Perkins-Tryon today (Thursday) and an if-necessary Game 3 on Friday. The series winner will advance to the 2024 Class 4A State Tournament scheduled for May 9-11.
After beating Anadarko 10-0 with senior Jackson Robertson (5-0) on the mound Wednesday, the Racers suffered a 6-5 loss to Harrah sparked by a late error.
King’s message to his players after the loss: “We played about as bad as we could play and they beat us by one.
“To their [Harrah’s] credit, they made a lot of plays, made a bunch of diving plays,” King said. “We had a costly error on a bunt that scored two. We tried to make a play at the plate, we throw it over the catcher’s head and they score the guy from second and third.”
Perhaps no three-game stretch in the 2024 season better indicates the progress of this year’s Newcastle team — a perennially competitive program that won 28 games each of the past two years but has not appeared in the State tournament this decade — than the three games that followed that loss.
“What I’ve been told is, last year, when things would go bad, they couldn’t get a stop or it would just snowball,” said King, who took the Newcastle head coach job in July after a two-year stint at Comanche. “This year, we’ve done a better job of overcoming some adversity, and that’s a daily grind that we’ve been talking about, ‘In baseball, you’re going to have some innings where it’s not going your way. You’ve just got to keep fighting and grinding through it.’” The Racers rallied Thursday to collect a 15-1 win over Pauls Valley. Sophomore Connor Leader (6-0) pitched five strikeouts in five innings and registered the win.
Tyler Frazier (6-2) put on a clinic in the first Harrah rematch later that day. He pitched five innings, gave up zero hits and scored two runs on two hits. Sophomore Lane Seaton hit a home run and batted in five runs.
“All of our pitchers pretty much gave us a chance. After the first game, we gave up three runs total,” King said.
Jackson Schanuel got the start in the final game and departed with a lead as Kaden Longman closed. Junior infielder Taj Smith hit two home runs that put 5 points on the board, one of which was a goahead “three-run bomb” that dug the Racers out of a 2-1 deficit in the third inning.
To make a play at the State championship, King said Newcastle needs to execute “the small things” over the next two weekends.
“Getting bunts down, throwing strikes, not walking people and then minimizing our errors,” King said, “but if we can do all the things that we’ve been preaching all year, I think we have a good shot.”
