Wild Things fail to meet expectations in 2015 campaign

The Wild Things were traveling the entrance ramp to “Respectability Road” last September. They overcame a bizarre coaching change at midseason and made the playoffs for the first time in seven years by qualifying for the Frontier League’s wild-card round.
A win at Evansville sent Washington to the semifinals, where the season ended, but there was momentum building. The future finally looked bright for the franchise, which had been saddled with a half dozen years of bad baseball and dwindling attendance. Interest was building. For the first time in years, there was hope that a championship might not be a pipe dream.
It didn’t last long.
The Wild Things’ season came to a close Sunday with a 42-54 record and fifth-place finish in the seven-team East Division, 21 games behind Southern Illinois. The Wild Things and the playoffs went their separate ways again.
The season became a maze when it was supposed to be amazing. The Wild Things were winding left and right, down one alley, up another, always reaching a dead end. “Respectability Road” was never within sight.
It was never supposed to be that way.
Washington returned 13 players from last year’s team. That was a good starting point. Then the Wild Things signed eight players with various amounts of experience in Class AA. Typically, if a Frontier League team has one such player it’s considered a coup. One of the eight players even spent time on a major league team’s 40-man roster.
The team looked good – on paper.
“The expectations we had for a number of Double-A guys, based on what we saw on paper, did not equal what we saw on the field,” Washington manager Bob Bozzuto said. “A number of our guys did not play to their career numbers. What we had and what we expected didn’t match.”
Of the eight Double-A players, only one, outfielder David Popkins, lasted on the roster the entire season. The five hitters combined for a .222 batting average and none of the three pitchers won a game.
“Some guys come into this league, and because they have Double-A experience they think it’s going to be easy. Then they have a rude awakening. The reality is, they have to make an adjustment quickly and some guys can’t,” said Bozzuto, who promised to change the way he builds a team.
“If I have a choice between a guy who had success in this league and some guy who was in Double-A or even played in Triple-A for a few games, then I’ll take the player who had success here, without question.”
The returning players weren’t much better. One player didn’t make the opening day roster, three others were traded, one was released after four games and another suffered a season-ending injury.
Kyle Helisek and Matt Sergey, the top two starting pitchers, battled injuries. Helisek (4-2, 1.71) didn’t throw a pitch after the all-star break and Sergey (3-4, 2.75) was traded to Laredo in the American Association, where he has thrown 20 consecutive scoreless innings for the playoff-bound Lemurs.
One bright spot was the development of Austin Wobrock, who made a seamless transition from second base to shortstop, raised his batting average to .266 and played in the all-star game. He was the only returning player who showed a significant spike in production.
Washington stumbled out of the gate, losing five of six games on a season-opening homestand. Three of the losses were by one run, which set the tone for the season. The Wild Things lost a league-high 22 one-run games.
”How many games did we lose when we were winning and couldn’t close it out?” asked center fielder Danny Poma, who went from hitting .308 with 30 stolen bases last year to .248 and 13 this season.
“Both the hitting and pitching was at issue. We couldn’t deliver the knockout punch with a key hit when we were winning, and too often the pitchers were working with little or no margin for error. We never gave them enough runs to allow for a mistake.”
After falling 10 games below .500 in June, Washington improved to 23-27 in mid-July but couldn’t sustain the momentum.
“We just didn’t produce,” Poma said. “We didn’t string hits together like last year. We also were constantly changing the lineup. It was like were looking for an identity all year and never found it.”
Both Poma and Bozzuto said the team chemistry wasn’t good, especially early in the season.
“We had guys who had been in affiliated ball versus guys who were in this league,” Bozzuto said. “Those guys who returned wanted to turn the magic back to last year. Last year was over with.”
Bozzuto likes that he can start the offseason with five returning starting pitchers – Luke Wilkins, Matt Fraudin, Jeremy Holcombe, Jon Klein and Ernesto Zaragoza – to build around in 2016 and the potential for Helisek to rejoin the mix.
The priority for 2016 is to inject life into the offense. That has been a longtime problem. Washington finished in a tie for the lowest team batting average (.242) in the league. That’s three times in five years the Wild Things have finished last in batting average.
“We’ll be looking for an experienced pitcher or two, a top-of-the-rotation guy. A guy like Aaron Ledbetter used to be for us – a slumpbreaker guy,” Bozzuto said. “We definitely need impact bats on offense.”
Sports editor Chris Dugan can be reached at dugan@observer-reporter.com.