Here is a quick Q & A from the University of Florida website with sophomore outfielder Justin Shafer. Shafer played for Yarmouth-Dennis in 2012 and is expected to return to the Red Sox this summer.
http://www.gatorzone.com/story.php?id=24705
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Shafer: “I was in the Cape Cod League last summer and everybody’s best arm, for the most part, was always an SEC guy, so the people we see regularly are the best in the country.”
I guess it depends on how you define “for the most part,” but I would disagree with him there. Hyannis’s best arm: Sean Manaea (Indiana State). YD’s best arm: Aaron Blair (Marshall). Chatham’s best arm: Michael Wagner (San Diego). Orleans’s best arm: Jaret Arakawa (Hawaii). Bourne’s best arm: Chad Green (Louisville). Brewster’s best arm: Tom Windle (Minnesota) or Sam Moll (Memphis). Falmouth’s best arm: Sam Paterson (Montana State), John Colella (Holy Cross), or Craig Schlitter (Bryant).
I’ll give him that Colby Suggs (Arkansas) was Wareham’s best arm, and perhaps AJ Reed (Kentucky) was Harwich’s. I suppose you could even make an argument that Kevin Ziomek (Vanderbilt) was Cotuit’s best arm until he left, though I’d still take Dan Slania (Notre Dame).
But two out of ten, or maybe three out of ten, isn’t “for the most part” by my definition.
Orville, shame on me… when I read the article, I didn’t question Shafer’s statement. You have named some of the very best arms the CCBL had to offer last summer. It makes Shafer’s comment seem rather silly.
No shame, Dave, you deserve credit for finding and posting an interesting interview. I hear a lot of comments like Shafer’s, but one of the great things about the CCBL is that it pits players from the big conferences against players from smaller ones, and every year players from “out of nowhere” become stars in the CCBL.
Remember a couple summers ago when it seemed like the whole Stony Brook team was playing on the Cape? I thought, What the heck is going on at Stony Brook? And the next year, when Stony Brook made the College World Series, most people were shocked — but anybody who followed the CCBL wasn’t.
If I had to vote for the strongest baseball conference in the country, I’d probably cast my vote for the SEC. But there is great college baseball being played everywhere these days, and the days when players from a single conference could dominate the CCBL — if they ever existed — are long gone.