Tale of two seasons

Through baseball Jordan Tassio learned how to develop amnesia. Each at-bat should be viewed as a separate and distinct event, detached from the error or strikeout that came before it.

The senior applied those lessons in the fall while running Naperville North’s double wing and spread offenses. If the mobile quarterback threw an interception, he wouldn’t let it consume him.

Whatever Tassio needs to forget, he still remembers the Class 8A football state title North captured in November. For a core group of Huskies, Tassio said, the experience gives them presence, knowledge about how to play in big games.

“It’s something we’ve been through already, so it’s not like we’ll be shellshocked,” Tassio said last week. “We’ll just play loose.”

Roughly one-third of North’s baseball roster was part of that championship football team. The Huskies hope their makeup is an advantage in the Class 4A playoffs, beginning for them Thursday against rival Naperville Central.

That’s how programs are built, with multi-sport athletes, and it’s worth remembering after a regular season that saw a steady stream of rainouts and media outlets suggesting that baseball should become a fall sport.

Predicting weather patterns in the age of global warming is foolish enough, but moving baseball out of spring would severely damage two sports at once, diluting the player talent pool and tearing coaching staffs apart.

Even then you’re still left hoping that Chicago weather holds up in October or November for the state series.

“That’s stupid,” Benet baseball coach Jeff Bonebrake said. “They’ll never compete with football.”

Bonebrake, the president of the Illinois High School Baseball Coaches Association, said such a switch would never happen - if anything the season’s start date could be moved back a week. But Bonebrake said he doesn’t think most coaches would like that schedule, because once the season stretches past graduation day, they don’t have much control over their players.

“It’s a spring sport,” Bonebrake said. “We’re dumb enough to live in Illinois.”

Standing in the middle of Benet’s field, still working on a postgame hot dog, Bonebrake was asked about a former Joliet Catholic teammate, and lifted his arms up to his chest.

“He didn’t have great bat speed because he was so big in here,” Bonebrake said. “But defensively he was (a) great catcher, great leader behind the plate.”

Bonebrake was talking about Mike Alstott, circa 1990, before he became an All-American fullback at Purdue and a Super Bowl champion with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Intangibles can sometimes compensate for bat speed.

The biggest change Bill Seiple has noticed about high school baseball in his 27 seasons as Central’s head coach is the rise of club teams and the splintering of multi-sport athletes.

Ideally, Central’s first baseman will be its outside linebacker, Seiple said, its catcher a quarterback on loan from the football team, and so on down the roster.

“That would be my preference, but it just doesn’t work that way anymore,” Seiple said earlier this season while discussing his talented crop of sophomores. “There are so many other influences and things that, you know, they have to address. … We see them all do it a different way.”

Seiple adheres to a theory floated by J.R. Bishop, Central’s football coach from 1979-82: If baseball is good, football will be good. The two program’s fortunes are intertwined.

“There’s something about learning to win, and learning to compete,” Seiple said. “You've got to make the block, you've got to make the free throw, you've got to get the base hit. … It’s all the same.”

Seiple reached this conclusion: At a certain point you need to leave the weight room and start keeping score.

North senior center fielder Ben Kelsey has delivered at least four game-winning hits in the final inning this season. He doesn’t understand why, joking that it might be part of his DNA.

“I don’t know, man. I told the guys… It’s got to be my parents or something like that cause I can’t explain it,” Kelsey said. “Every time there’s a big situation it seems like I’m at the plate or making a play in the field.”

North baseball coach Carl Hunckler, also a football assistant who handles the Huskies’ defensive backs, definitely falls on the side of nurture over nature in this debate after watching Kelsey intercept passes and smack two-out singles.

“There are certain individuals who want to be in that situation,” Hunckler said. “There’s no doubt in my mind, having coached Ben in two sports for two years, that he thrives on that. Kids will always talk about, ‘I’m a clutch player. I’m a clutch player.’ But the only way that you prove it is what you do between the lines.”

Contact Patrick Mooney at pmooney@scn1.com or 630-416-5107.