Futures Collegiate Baseball League News & Notes

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Summer is now in full swing. The hot weather has arrived and so has the return of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. The summer collegiate wooden bat league gives college baseball players a chance to work on their games in a relaxed atmosphere. The eight-team league has been playing games since right after the Memorial Day holiday. The league will conclude its season by the middle of August. There is good baseball to be seen over the next eight weeks so here is an example of what we mean.

Five of the eight teams are playing at least .500 baseball through twenty-five games of the season. The top two ball clubs, the Brockton Rox (17-9) and the Pittsfield Suns (18-10) are playing at a .600 clip. The Suns are riding a four-game winning streak as this week’s schedule gets underway. The team is being led at the plate by a player that did not play any college baseball at all this spring. Jackson Appel is a student at Penn University. Since Penn is an Ivy League school they along with the rest of the league decided not to play baseball this spring due to the ongoing Covid-19 situation. So for Jackson, it has been a long wait to finally get back on the field, and so far he has made the most of it. The catcher from Pittsfield is hitting .379 which leads the league at the moment. He has hit safely in eight of his last ten games, which includes three multi-hit contests. Of his 22 hits, only six of them have been for extra bases which is probably not a surprise given how little he has played. Since joining the Suns, Appel has appeared in all 16 games to date and has been doing the job.

A team that has struggled is the defending champs from a season ago the Nashua Silver Knights. At this time they sit in last place at 8-19. Over their last ten games played, they have gone 3-7. They find themselves nine and a half games behind the league-leading Brockton Rox. The good news is the Silver Knights have won two of their last three ball games. As a team, Nashua is hitting only .207 with only one player, Brandon Fish of UMass Lowell, hitting above .300 at .316. The infielder has only been in ten games for the team but has hits in four of them. His best night came back on June 25 when Fish recorded a three-hit night. The pitching staff has a combined 5.33 ERA. One who does stand out is Boston College’s right-hander Aidan Crowley. He has a record of 2-1 with an ERA of 3.13. In 23 innings pitched he has allowed 21 hits to go along with 25 punchouts and 12 free passes.

The league’s Player of the Week is Ben Rounds of Brockton. The Harvard University product went 7-for-15 with four doubles, nine runs batted in, and five runs scored in five games last week. Rounds reached base in all five games and had multiple hits and RBI in four of those games. He has five doubles so far this summer, four of them came last week. He got things started last week by going 3-for-3 with a two-bagger and two runs driven in in last Tuesday night’s win over Westfield.

The Pitcher of the Week is Grant Nickolson of Pittsfield. He went five shutout innings in game two of a doubleheader last Thursday vs Nashua. He struck out nine and gave up just one lone single. He retired the side in order three times in his outing while allowing two walks. Nickolson is a sophomore at Kansas State in the Big-12, Has only given up two hits and one run in 8.2 innings pitched. He has started his last two outings for Pittsfield.

That is just some of what is happening in the Futures League. Stay here to find out more as the summer moves along.