A Peek at the 2012 Hannibal Cavemen

We’re just over four weeks away from Hannibal Cavemen baseball. Here’s a look at how some of the future Cavemen are doing at their respective colleges..

Among the returnees, righthander Dustin Lawson is 2-1 in six starts at Lee University in Cleveland Tennessee. He has struck out 30 and walked 19 in 26.2 innings. Lawson’s ERA is 3.04.

Former Hannibal Pirate Zach Nichols is hitting .388 with 7 homers and 34 RBI’s at Southeastern Community College. Nichols was a late season addition for the Cavemen last summer.

Trey Lang is at Gateway Community College in Mesa Arizona. Unfortunately, their sports information department hasn’t seen fit to post any stats. We have a fair idea of what Lang can do. He hit .254 with 3 homers and 24 RBI’s last summer.

Some of the expected newcomers have some nice looking stat lines too.
Outfielder Spencer Anderson is hitting .402 with a dozen stolen bases in fourteen attempts through 27 games at Mid Continent University in Ft. Wayne Indiana.

The pitching staff appears to be headlined by a pair of tall lefties including 6’5” Kris Gardner at Wichita State. He’s 4-1 for the Shockers with 42 innings pitched , 30 strikeouts and eight walks.

The roster also includes some young, talented players spending the college season as reserves or redshirts. Sometimes those players come up big in summer baseball.  It is not unheard of for players deep in a good program to make a name for themselves during summer baseball.

Rosters will change as the season approaches and starts. Sometimes those late additions are the most memorable.  The best college summer league player performance I’ve ever seen came from Kirby Puckett in 1981. He was a last minute replacement for a guy who showed up for a preseason workout at Q-Stadium in Quincy, took one look at that rock wall and the then horrible lights and left. Puckett was the replacement. Puckett hit something like .390 despite the so-called lighting and rewrote large parts of the CICL record book. He was under contract with the Twins the next summer. You know the rest of his story.