It’s pretty safe to say that the Redmond Mustangs baseball team, which graduated 14 seniors off 2008’s 18-2 league-championship squad, did the unexpected this season.

The Mustangs were merely an afterthought in many preseason lists concerning the top teams in the state, much less the league.

And there was reason for the preseason pundits and scouts to overlook the Mustangs, who were fielding a group of talented, but raw, underclassmen players with something to prove.

Fortunately for the green and gold, they had just the coach to keep the program’s winning ways intact.

Mustang head coach Dan Pudwill has been around the game for more than a decade, and has an extensive history coaching summer ball from the U-15 to U-18 levels, as well as at Inglewood Jr. High. The techniques he used with his 2009 Redmond High team mimicked his approach he used with his younger select teams, with an emphasis on detail and defense.

“This year as opposed to last year, normally I do focus a lot on defense and execution, but in practices this year even more so,” Pudwill said. “We also focused on more of the detail-oriented pieces of the game, the things that I always coach and teach, but with previous teams they’ve been through it with a year or two of practice. It’s stuff we didn’t have to do as much, but here we had to have much more repetition with defensive execution and guys at new positions.”

For guiding the young Mustangs to the best regular-season record in 4A Kingco at 17-3, Pudwill is the Redmond Reporter’s Coach of the Year.

TWIN KILLING

The one-two punch of sophomores Dylan Davis and Michael Conforto were front and center in the Mustangs domination of the Crest Division with a record of 15-2.

Davis took over as the staff ace, earning six regular-season wins to lead the team, while often helping himself out offensively. The 6-foot sophomore blasted six home runs this season, tying Conforto for the league lead.

A third tenth-grader who had a stellar year but stayed out of the limelight was Zach Abbruzza, who shined on defense and offense.

“Dylan Davis, his numbers earned him second-team all-state, which is pretty impressive. Michael Conforto… average-wise he was (low), but he played some decent defense and hit some big home runs for us,” lauded Pudwill. “But a guy people don’t talk about enough is Zach Abbruzza. He was extremely effective as our late-inning guy and shutting teams down when our starters couldn’t go the distance, and offensively he was one of our best hitters in the middle-end of the season.”

The sophomores said it was Pudwill’s ability to get the club to mesh that made the team successful.

“Coach was really able to get us to bond as a team and play as one big group and not focus on ourselves,” Davis said. “He really focused on the team aspect … we wanted to do good and he took us as far as we could go.”

COMEBACK KIDS

Pudwill was quick to acknowledge that any success that his team might have had in the past year needed to be credited to his players for overachieving in a year where the Mustangs sported a new starting lineup.

“It was the talent of the players,” said Pudwill on the key to his team’s success. “They might have been young, but they were as talented as any group in the league… I was fortunate to have such a group.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t hit as much as guys would have liked to, but we spent a lot of time on defense and tried to hone that part of our game.”

Much like the 2009 Seattle Mariners, who at press time have 21 come-from-behind wins this year, the Mustangs simply found a way to win late in ball games.

A prime example was Redmond’s thrilling 7-6 victory over perennial league favorite Lake Washington back on April 21, where Acker surrendered four runs in the top of the first before settling down, forcing the Mustangs to scratch and claw their way back into the game. They did just that, fueled by back-to-back home runs by Davis and Conforto and a walk-off single in the ninth by junior Chad Hui-Peterson.

“Within the games, we were slow starters,” Pudwill noted. “We did not jump out on teams, but we came back on them. If we ever got into a team’s bullpen, we were really dangerous.”

The fifth-year coach called that game the point in the season, which was in the middle of the Mustangs’ 11-game winning streak, where they knew they were the team to beat in Kingco.

“When we went over and played LW and won… record-wise it separated us,” Pudwill said. “It was towards the middle-end of the season that we had established ourselves in the regular season.”

YOUTH IS SERVED

Heading into the Kingco playoffs, the Mustangs seemed unstoppable, which made the team’s collapse all the more puzzling.

“When we were on that winning streak, we knew that when our pitchers were on the hill that they were going to be successful and keep us in the game, and that we had guys that were going to hit the ball, sometimes a long way,” Pudwill said. “I’m going to continue to try and figure out (what happened in the postseason).”

Regardless of whether it was inexperience, matching up against really good starting pitching in Colin Hering, a lack of focus, or a combination of all three, nothing can take away from the fact that Pudwill’s team came out of nowhere to be ranked as high as second in the state by the Washington Baseball Poll, and will look to build on this unexpected success in the seasons to come.

“Obviously I feel pretty confident (next year) because of what we did. It’s going to be a tale of two seasons —last year it was the lowest of expectations and this next year it will be the highest,” admitted Pudwill, adding that on the whole, the talent in the league was young last season. “There’s a lot of talent across the board… and all of the top pitchers, save one or two, were underclassmen. It will be competitive, and by no means would I declare us the favorites or anything like that because there’s some good players out there.”