‘Always the cherry on top’: Santa Barbara Foresters win back-to-back NBC World Series
The summer ended with yet another National Baseball Congress World Series championship in Wichita, but that ending was far from inevitable this season for the Santa Barbara Foresters — no matter how much it seemed so the last two weeks.
It’s hard to believe after the Foresters’ domination en route to their second straight World Series title, but at one point this summer the team had lost four of six games and was 15-7 overall.
“I have a responsibility to these (college) coaches who send us their players to do some development and work on getting them better, and I felt like I was failing them as a coach,” Santa Barbara manager Bill Pintard said. “So we had a little meeting because we knew we needed to turn things around.
“After that talk, some of the older guys on the team came up to me and said, ‘Coach, we’re going to get this thing turned around. We’re not going to lose the rest of the summer.’ And guess what? We didn’t.”
Santa Barbara completed its 21-game winning streak to end the summer with a 14-2 rout of Austin, Texas-based club Lonestar Baseball in Saturday’s championship game. The Foresters finished 5-0, outscored opponents 52-11 and led the tournament in team batting average (.350), stolen bases (19), fielding percentage (.976) and earned run average (1.50).
The Foresters added another chapter to their dominance in the NBC World Series spanning much of the last two decades. With Saturday’s win, the Foresters won their ninth overall championship in Wichita since 2006 and won back-to-back titles for the second time (2011-12) during that span.
They are the only franchise to have won back-to-back NBC World Series titles since the Peninsula Oilers won two straight in 1993-94.
“We had a very talented team and we were so diverse,” Pintard said. “We really could do it on all fronts. We were playing pretty well at the end of the summer, then we came into Wichita and we just kept rolling and actually kept getting better. We played our best baseball of the summer in this tournament. And winning the NBC is always the cherry on top.”
But what set the Foresters apart the most from their competition was the quality and depth of their pitching staff.
It started with Justin Eckhardt, a redshirt freshman at Texas who had a dominant summer coming off Tommy John surgery. After a successful summer in California, Eckhardt was just about unhittable in Wichita — throwing 12 scoreless innings in a pair of shutouts in his starts — and earned tournament MVP honors.
But the best pitcher on their staff through the summer was actually Ben Abram, a redshirt sophomore at Oklahoma. He also had a five-inning shutout victory earlier in the tournament and the Foresters handed him the ball to start Saturday’s championship game.
“We had a great one-two combination right there with those two guys,” Pintard said. “It was a lot of fun to watch the guys compete.”
The Foresters also had loaded talent on offense, as they had five different players hit home runs during the tournament in Seth Stephenson (Tennessee), Dylan Campbell (Texas), Andrew Kachel (Fresno State), Zach Leach (Arkansas) and Steve Zobac (California). Josh Stinson (Georgia) led the team in hitting, while Santa Barbara also had good summers from Tanner O’Tremba (Arizona), Kendall Pettis (Oklahoma), Jamey Smart (Loyola Marymount) and Ryan Wrobleski (Dallas Baptist).
This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
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