Titans didn't monkey around

By Pat Coleman

Illinois Wesleyan set its monkey free, winning a baseball national championship for the first time. SUNY-Cortland photo by Larry Radloff

GRAND CHUTE, Wis. -- It was April 29, heading into the stretch run of the Division III baseball season for most teams north of the Mason-Dixon line. Except for Illinois Wesleyan, that day ended with a loss to Concordia (Ill.), a 7-6 home defeat that left the Titans 14-17. At 8-7 in the CCIW, there was a chance that the Titans wouldn't even make the conference tournament.

Ryan Hopp was batting .286. Mark McDermott was at .269. Zach Scott was .245. Kraig Ladd was at .164. And Jeff Grodecki was hitting just .225.

 Fast forward five weeks and Grodecki is banging out two home runs and going 5-for-5 in the national title game. Scott, a freshman, knocked in game-winning runs on back-to-back nights as the Titans went 3-0 to start the nationals. Hopp hit .391 over the final 21 games with 18 RBI and 24 runs scored. And with 21 games -- a 17-4 mark -- in 33 days, it was a whirlwind run for the Titans, who finished 31-21 and won the 2010 Division III baseball national championship with a 17-5 win against Cortland State.

It seems, to borrow a phrase Titans coach Dennis Martel used frequently in Wisconsin, unbelievable.

"It is really a Cinderella story for us to get here and accomplish what we have," Martel said after the game. "The guys have just done a great job. I couldn't be more proud of what we did. It's been an unbelievable ride and I thank them for letting me be part of it. I counted up 19 days since we started the conference tournament and what an unbelievable 19 days it's been. A lot of it in hotels and on the road, but 'national champion Illinois Wesleyan' sounds really good."

It's the first national championship in Division III baseball for a College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin team. 

The offense came together, scoring 8.5 runs per game over the final 21 games after scoring a little over six per contest after. For some players, it was a matter of just getting healthy, like Kraig Ladd did. He separated his shoulder in football season, where he was the Titans' starting quarterback, and after batting .381 and .340 as a sophomore and junior, he slumped as a senior. 

"There was so much on my mind with graduation and everything," Ladd told the (Bloomington) Pantagraph last week. "I said to my mom I had to stop thinking and realize the game was fun and just go out there and play."

Ladd went 2-for-5 in the title game to lift his championships average to .286 and his season-ending average to .250.

But the most dramatic difference came from a matter of inches. That's the distance Grodecki moved his hands in changing his stance. "I'd say about a month ago I changed my swing," the junior third baseman said. "Coach (Mike) Brown and Martel decided that I needed to do something new. I got my hands from up here (near his shoulders) to down here (just below the letters), and I've probably been hitting about .450, .500 since then, so just a change in the swing."

Grodecki hit .476 with four home runs over his final 21 games, but he was far from the only one to hit a hot streak. McDermott hit .474. Casey McIntosh hit .385 with six homers. Ladd hit .363. As a team, the Titans hit .356, and remember most of that was against NCAA Tournament opponents.

Or, perhaps it was a little more intangible. Catcher Mark McDermott jokingly pegged it all on a team outing shortly before the conference tournament. 

"We kind of made it a joke. This whole season we've kind of said that we could literally make a movie out of the characters we had on the team. It's just a lot of fun. And we made a joke -- they just put a new Dollar Tree right down from our campus. Brett Moore, we saw this monkey sitting there and that's the monkey you see on all the trophies now."

"We got it for Ryan Hopp, that's just the joke. Ever since we got that monkey, when we were playing North Central, we've been hitting the (crap) out of the ball."

Whatever it was, Martel knew well enough to get the heck out of the way. "They just started hitting, everything got on a roll. As a coach I may be dumb, but I'm smart enough to let the roll go. What a ride it's been."