A Hall of Fame performance: With the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame inductions taking place in Cooperstown this past weekend, the Philly Blue Sox 12U squad stole some of the spotlight. The Blue Sox went 11–0 and were the final team standing in a national baseball tournament that featured 48 total teams. SOURCE: MIKE ZOLK
This past weekend in Cooperstown, New York, represented finality in the baseball careers of Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio, who were enshrined there into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
But it also signified a beginning of sorts for a dozen 12-year-olds from Philadelphia who managed to reach baseball immortality by winning 11 games — and a championship — in a prestigious national tournament that spanned an entire week.
The Philly Blue Sox 12U team assembled in January and trained for six months to get ready for Cooperstown. In a season full of elite tournaments, Cooperstown is the crown jewel, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It draws teams from all over the country, and the Blue Sox, who train at Sluggersville on Blue Grass Road in the Northeast, were one of 48 to participate. In order to win the whole thing, one lucky team has to go 11–0 through a single-elimination bracket to reach the pinnacle. The Blue Sox did so, defeating a squad from Illinois, 4–3, in the championship contest last Thursday evening that stretched past midnight (they also bested squads from Florida, California, Texas, Indiana and Canada, to name a few).
“This is our best tournament, and we started our year in January to get there to compete and do the best we can,” said Blue Sox head coach Mike “Big Zoom” Zolk, president of the Blue Sox and director of operations at Sluggersville. “In high-level tournament ball, there’s no room for mistakes. On weekends, with their parents’ blessing, we were in here practicing until 3 in the morning; if you’re able to handle me putting pressure on you like that, then it just becomes second nature. It’s why I believe these boys are ready to play high school baseball right now.”
Zolk, who coaches the team with his son, Mike “Little Zoom” Zolk, who played collegiately at the University of North Carolina, is qualified to make such a statement. He’s the former head baseball coach at Neumann-Goretti, and puts in countless hours preparing the Blue Sox youth teams — an 8-, 12-, 13-year-old team, plus two 16-year-old squads — for high school and college baseball.
His energetic, infectious personality combined with a deep baseball knowledge makes him come off as half-coach, half-big brother to his kids, an environment that makes them loose and comfortable off the field but intense and uber-competitive on it. Zolk said they execute fundamentals of the game — relay throws, holding runners on, taking advantage of defensive miscues on the basepaths — that would impress (and outdo) most high school teams.
It’s how they managed to hit 20 home runs in 11 games, scoring 119 runs to their opponents’ 28. It’s also how a pitching staff of seventh- and eighth-graders walked just 13 total batters the entire week, as Zolk and other Blue Sox coaches strive to show that baseball teams from the Northeast part of the country can be just as elite as their counterparts from hotbed baseball states such as California, Texas and Florida. They did just that, sometimes having to win three games a day to get the point across.
“Our motto at any tournament is to be the last car out,” Zolk said. “In the championship, my pitcher, Jackson Figiel, gave up two home runs in the final inning to cut it to 4–3. I walked out to the mound to see if he was OK, he just said to me, ‘We’ll be the last car out.’ It was after midnight, and we had to rip a hangnail off his thumb before the game. I told them before the game to have a blast and treat every pitch like you’re playing wiffle ball in the backyard.”
“My greatest memory is Zoom asking if I wanted to come out after the homers,” Figiel added. “Then I closed it out. It was the greatest experience of my life.”
Catcher and third baseman Ryan Rooney threw three guys out stealing, smacked four home runs and made the last out of the championship at third … all with a broken middle finger. Leadoff hitter and centerfielder Conor Cook fouled a few balls off his foot that caused an infected toe/ingrown toenail. They were bruised, banged up and exhausted, and still found a way to get it done. Images of Big Zoom hoisting the 6-foot-tall championship trophy above his head are ubiquitous on Facebook, showing just how much this victory was enjoyed — and earned — by everybody involved, young and old alike.
“It was great to put the name Philly Blue Sox out there to teams from all over the country,” said leftfielder Joe Turanckas. “All I could think about after the final out was, we just won a national championship. It’s crazy.”
Turanckas, Figiel, Cook and Rooney — along with teammates Sean Zolk, Shawn LeVan, Ryan Morgan, Ryan Bailey, Colin Kelly, Kevin Ralston, Justus Agosto and Justin Barcoski — came together with the cohesion and maturity of boys above their age group, and the thing that excited them the most, besides the championship victory, of course, is being able to bond over this momentous occasion for the rest of their lives. No matter where life takes them after this, they’ll always have Cooperstown, which is something every professional ballplayer hopes to be able to say when his career is over.
For the 12-year-old Philly Blue Sox, their baseball careers are just beginning.
“In 1982, I played soccer for Lighthouse and we won a state championship,” Zolk recalled in front of most of his team during a Monday interview. “To this day, it’s one of the greatest memories of my life. Some of my best friends from that team are still my best friends today. I still have the team picture from that year in my phone, and before the championship, I looked at it and said a prayer for these kids to win, because they deserved it.
“This team, they were a lot like that one. They picked on each other relentlessly for a week, as boys do, but they take care of each other and love each other. The only way to describe it is a bunch of kids with great chemistry who would run through a wall for one another, and they got to do that in Cooperstown. It was the experience of a lifetime.” ••
