Baseball team holds scout day Sunday

Professional scouts from various Major League Baseball organizations hold up radar guns while athletes from the CMU baseball program display their skills during the annual Scout Day Sunday afternoon at Theunissen Stadium. “It’s a great opportunity for the scouts to evaluate the whole team at once,” Clyde Weir of the Detroit Tigers said. “It’s very valuable.”
(Ashley Miller/Staff Photographer)

Weekends in the fall are normally saved for football games, but it was the Central Michigan baseball team taking the field Sunday.

On a bright-skied afternoon, the team held its annual scout day.

Major League Baseball scouts from the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Washington Nationals, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago White Sox sat behind home plate, most with a radar gun in one hand, pencil in the other and a clipboard on their laps.

A couple others were lingering around Theunissen Stadium to get a glimpse of the Chippewas.

“Our biggest thing today, obviously, was we wanted to showcase some of our guys to the scouts that were here,” head coach Steve Jaksa said. “That’s always a good thing, to give them the opportunity.”

Jaksa would not pinpoint anyone in particular that was impressive.  Rather, he spoke about how it was just another day to try to achieve the consistency he wants from his team.

“I’m never going to be the one to single out certain guys,” he said. “I was more interested in the number of quality at-bats we had, how guys took certain pitches in certain locations, and I want guys to understand what I want from them.”

There were a number of activities for scouts to evaluate the players.

They had a 6o-yard dash, which Nick Regnier finished the fastest with a time of 6.71. Other activities included batting practice, an infield session and a couple pseudo-innings to show how the pitchers would do in game action.

Detroit Tigers scout Clyde Weir said college scout days give him a chance, not to hone in on a player, but to look at everyone before the season.

“It’s just a chance to see them repeat their skills,” he said. “A workout like this, they have to repeat the exercise over and over.”

Jordan Adams, who was not satisfied with his performance, played first and third base.

He said practicing with the scouts in the stands wasn’t any different and that the team was just trying to improve.

“I did not perform as well as I would have liked to,” Adams said. “But it’s week one.  We’ve got a couple more weeks of fall ball. The season is still a long ways off, so we’ve got a lot of ways to improve.”