By Jaykob Smith
The Grand Rapids Community College Raiders are currently ranked No. 1 overall in their Michigan Community College Athletic Association conference at 18-2. While the Raiders had an overall positive season last year ending with a 31-22-1 overall record, they are on pace to have a far better season this year.
The only conference games that the Raiders have lost so far have been against Mid Michigan College on March 30 in a 2-3 final score and the game that broke their win streak against Muskegon Community College in a 11-14 loss.
The Raiders have played excellent baseball the last few weeks and Muskegon showed to be their toughest opponent yet. With most of their games being within 1 run, excluding the first and last games, and going into extra innings for two of their games.
Last season the MCCAA conference had only two divisions, the Western and the Eastern divisions. This year the conference is broken up into three different divisions with the Raiders being moved from the Western division, where they came in second behind Kellogg Community College in 2022. This year the Raiders are leading the Northern division.
Coach Mike Eddington, the fifth-year head coach of the Raiders commented on the conference change saying that it is a “big change playing five games on the weekend vs. four.” He went on to say that they would need to stay more focused with the new schedule.
With the team doing well so far Eddington specifically mentioned that he was “very impressed with our pitching staff and hitting.” This lines up with the numbers. In the past 18 games, the Raiders only allowed a total of 45 runs and have scored a massive 154 runs in that same period of time.
And while the Raiders have been doing very well, early in the season Eddington said, “There is plenty of room for improvement. We also need to improve defensively and that’s our biggest weakness as of now.”
This was true early in the season and can be seen in the numbers, while only allowing five runs they also made five errors in their first four games. Unfortunately, that trend has seemed to continue with the Raiders allowing 17 errors in their last 18 games. However, even with the errors the team has been playing great this year and they are on track to capture the MCCAA Northern division title.
The next series the Raiders will play will be on April 28-30 in Escanaba against Bay College.
