Shockers in the news.

Shockers Better Than Ever?
Posted 2009-06-19
Maybe, But They're Still Just 2-4
By Dustin Dopirak
HARRISONBURG - The New Market Shockers' holes are slowly starting to fill.
The fifth-year Rockingham County Baseball League franchise has maintained a reliable corps of players. It finally has a pitching staff deep enough to keep position players off the mound most of the time.
Defensively, the Shockers are solid, and they have at least a few potent offensive weapons.
"Talent-wise and pitching-wise," third baseman Josh Veney, son of manager Smokey Veney, said, "this is our best team we've had in a long time, maybe ever."
And so far, it's 2-4.
That's the way progress has been since the Shockers joined the league. The improvements have been continuous, but they've been slow and painstaking, and sometimes, they haven't shown up in the wins and losses. Every time one facet of their game has seemed to improve, another has fallen off.
"We had guys that started off hot at the plate, but we haven't been able to get that big hit when we needed it," said first baseman Kevin Rush, who, as Smokey Veney's stepson, has helped build the team. "We've been in just about every ball game we've played, and we've had opportunities to score some runs. But just getting that big two-out hit, we haven't been able to do that yet. That's the difference in our season. We're 2-4, but we could easily be 4-2 had we gotten that big hit when we needed it."
In some ways, though, that's an encouraging assessment, because it implies that the Shockers at least have the players capable of turning things around.
In previous years, the New Market brass have admitted that they simply didn't have enough arms to compete with the RCBL's elite, and that beating its middle class was something the Shockers could only do with one of their aces on the mound. Just to finish games, New Market would often have to pluck an everyday position player off the field and throw him in the game. Shortstop Zach Stiles, for instance, ranked fourth on the staff last year with 29 2/3 innings pitched.
This year, though, that won't happen. In left-hander Kirk Messick, who left Broadway after last summer and signed with the Shockers, and right-hander Zach Leake, they have two of the most reliable innings eaters in the RCBL. Before the Shockers' extra-innings loss to Montezuma this week, they had combined for 25 2/3 of New Market's 40 innings pitched so far this season.
The Shockers have nine guys who are pitchers. If you count former James Madison left-hander Jacob Cook, who throws for the Shockers when he's not fulfilling his duties as an assistant coach with the Valley League's Rockbridge Rapids, they have 10.
"Oh that's great," Smokey Veney said. "I mean, to have somebody on the bench that you can just look at and say, ‘Hey, I need you to go warm up,' without having to wait for him to come in between innings, that really helps."
Messick was the most important addition. Always among the RCBL's league leaders in strikeouts and innings pitched, he was often the only thing that kept an in-flux Broadway team anywhere near contention. His addition has allowed the Shockers to finally take some pressure off Leake, who pitched 57 innings last year.
"I thought about going to Clover Hill or a place like that that's pretty established," Messick said. "But I decided I'd like to be on a team where I can be that one key player maybe they need. Every year, the Shockers are sixth or seventh, but they're one or two wins away from being fourth or fifth. I figured that maybe I could add four or five more wins."
That's going to require a bit more offense.
Through its first five games, New Market was hitting just .239 as a team, and it had scored 13 of its 22 runs in an early-season victory over Shenandoah. The Shockers have averaged less than three runs per game in the rest of their contests. Outfielder Nathan Batman is hitting an RCBL-best .600, but all nine of his hits are singles and he doesn't have an RBI yet. Infielder Adam Foltz is hitting .368 and Cook is hitting .333, but no one else is higher than .286.
Still, with any kind of offensive improvement, the Shockers have a good chance to improve on last year's 9-19 regular season and fifth-place finish, the best they've had in the RCBL. Thanks to several rainouts and postponements, the beginning of New Market's schedule was brutal, with three of their four losses coming to Montezuma and Stuarts Draft, which are tied for first. Win the games they should the rest of the year, and the Shockers should find themselves in the middle of the pack.
The next step, Rush said, is to try to become a contender. They might not have the personnel quite yet, he said, but they aren't that far away.
"I think we need to sign that one extra bat and that one extra arm," Rush said. "That maybe makes the difference in us moving up in the standings."
Which they hope can happen quicker than it has so far.