logo via vhsl.org, the Virginia High School League.
There may have been nearly a foot of snow on the ground a week ago, and it may be scheduled to snow yet again tomorrow (Friday 3/20/15), but prep baseball kicks off this week in the DC metro area.
Baseball America posted their pre-season top 50 High School rankings in mid February, since the southern/warm states can start playing a ton earlier than us northern states (there are schools in Texas who have already played 10-12 games). The only DC-area school noted is my alma mater James Madison HS in Vienna, ranked 27th to start by BA. Which I can’t quite believe, even as a homer fan, based on who they have returning and who they have being recruited for Div 1 schools right now (they do have the returning all-Met John DeFazio, one of just a handful of returning Junior all-Mets from last year). But hey, that’s why they play the games, right?
(post publishing note: the WP’s first top 10 on 3/26/15 has Madison #1 with the expected local powerhouses populating the top 10).
Other National HS team ranking sites for reference:
- Baseball America: 2/24/15 pre-season rankings and their 3/10/15 rankings early into the National seasons.
- USA today; too early yet for rankings but home page at http://usatodayhss.com/
- Maxpreps.com: at this link, constantly updating. Per their pre-season top-100 list, local teams getting recognition early include both 5-A finalists from last year Freeman and Hickory, 6-A Richmond power Cosby, Madison at #51, and defending Maryland 3-A champ Reservoir at #77.
- PerfectGame.org: top 50 ranks: unclear if they have updated this for the new season yet, but this is the permalink. They mention only Hickory and Battlefield.
- (if you are aware of other ranking sites, please let me know).
Madison’s season (and a lot of other local HS teams) kicks off on Friday March 20th against defending 5-A north champion Stone Bridge. A juicy match-up; basically the two best regular season teams from the area last year face off to start the new season. Too bad its likely to get snowed out and maybe not even rescheduled. Battlefield looks like it could be quite good this year as chronicled in this InsideNova.com article. Otherwise it is hard to predict how the 2015 season may run.
Madison finished 21-3 last year and surprisingly lost in the regional semi finals, while Stone Bridge finished the year 22-2 and made it to the state semi finals despite losing ace Jacob (J.B.) Bukauskas prior to the playoffs (Bukauskas passed up on being a possible 1st round pick and is now in UNC’s rotation as a freshman, already seemingly moving from being their Sunday to their Saturday starter). Lets hope if they don’t play tomorrow that they at least get to re-schedule the game.
Can’t wait for another season of prep baseball to track. Local draft/marquee player post coming soon.
Local Baseball Resources that I use constantly: this is my typical list of resources that I’ll tag onto all HS posts
National High School Baseball Ranking Lists: once they start publishing, i’ll include direct links here. See above links for what’s available this early in the season.
Local Prep Resources:
- Washington Post’s AllMetSports section with standings and schedule results. Direct link to Local Baseball Standings.
- Inside Nova.com‘s coverage of local high school sports.
- The Connection family of newspapers has a sports section that is rarely updated, but it does do some coverage.
- MaxPreps.com has some non-paywall HS information.
- perfectgame.org to look up high-end HS prospects.
- thebaseballcube.com and baseball-reference.com for deep searching of players based on HS alma-maters and home towns (these links open directly to HS-based searches).
- Nvdaily.com (Strasburg) has some results for some of the teams in the smaller conferences/outskirts of DC, generally in the Strasburg area.
- WinchesterStar (Winchester) has results for Winchester teams but its pay-only.
- The Daily Progress (Culpeper local paper) also has some scores for schools in its areas.
- Fredericksburg.com has some local coverage of Fredericksburg and Woodbridge teams.
- Richmond Times-Dispatch has a HS scoreboard.
- Hampton Roads Pilot (Hampton Roads) has scores for teams in the Chesapeake/Norfolk/Va Beach area. They also have their own top-10 rankings for area teams.
- The Baltimore Sun’s high school page has information on some of the programs outside the DC area mentioned in the Maryland section (and here’s the updated Baltimore top-20, akin to the AllMetSports top-10 list).
- VHSL’s and MPSSAA home pages for playoff brackets and updates for VA and MD respectively.