Plum baseball gearing up for season’s defining stretch

By: Jerin Steele
Thursday, April 27, 2023 | 4:58 PM

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The Plum baseball team has everything right in front of it.

Over the next two weeks, the Mustangs will play the two teams they are currently tied with atop the Section 1-5A standings. They meet Franklin Regional on Monday and Tuesday and Fox Chapel the following Monday and Tuesday.

All three teams have 6-2 section records.

At the end of the season, the Mustangs could be section champs. There’s also a possibility they could miss the postseason altogether, but they’ll enter these final two section series with confidence, riding a six-game winning streak.

“We talked about that a little bit (Wednesday) before practice. It’s all right there for us,” Plum coach Carl Vollmer said. “Even when we hit a little bit of a rough stretch in the 6A portion of our schedule against Seneca Valley, Pine-Richland and North Allegheny, we competed in those games and, as a matter of fact, were a play or two away from winning.

“The great thing about it is we’re going to go and find out who’s the best team in this section. We’ll figure that out in the next two weeks.”

The rough stretch brought four consecutive losses in late March and early April, but since then, the Mustangs have been on a roll. They’ve outscored opponents 48-19, including a sweep of Gateway, 4-1 and 14-7, this week. Prior to the winning streak were section splits with Armstrong and Penn-Trafford.

Vollmer said pitching has been the team’s most consistent strength. Juniors Colin Watson and Erik Streussnig and seniors Caden Norcutt and Brady Dojonovic have led the staff.

“I really feel like our pitching has been in a good place all year,” Vollmer said. “Sometimes the stat lines don’t look tremendous, but our pitching has kept us in baseball games all year. They’ve done a really good job. We’ve been built on pitching for a long time. We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of good pitchers come through our program over the years. This year, they’ve allowed us to get going offensively as the season has gone on. That’s helped us go on the run that we’re on right now.”

The offense was a bit of a work in progress in the early going, but it’s picked up as of late. The Mustangs have scored more than five runs in four of the last six wins.

Norcutt has been the catalyst, but Vollmer said they’ve had contributions throughout the lineup. They also have plugged in different players for matchup purposes, and it’s paid off.

Now they’re fine-tuning their approach going into the next two series.

“We’ve been working on some things specifically prior to these next two series, because we know we’re going to see good pitching,” Vollmer said. “The nonsection schedule we played was designed to prepare us for this. We still haven’t played our best baseball, but we’re getting closer to it and have been.”

The Mustangs have some seasoned players like Norcutt and Dojonovic, who played on the 2021 team that won a section title. The current group has run the gamut this season, which they’re using to their benefit for the stretch run.

“We’ve experienced everything this year, and I’m hoping those experiences pay off,” Vollmer said. “We’ve played some tight games. We’ve been up big and lost. We’ve played some close games where we’ve won and lost. The two games with Penn-Trafford were intense, tough section games against a good team. We lost one to Armstrong in 10 innings that would’ve changed things if we would’ve been on the winning end of it.

“We felt like we were in position to win, but we didn’t finish the job. So, now on a bigger scale, we need to finish the job by going out and playing well in these final two series against two pretty good baseball teams.”

Jerin Steele is a freelance writer

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