By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

The local organization itself is pretty young, so the team doesn’t have a whole lot of history and tradition.

But entering the Nike MLB RBI Southeastern Tournament, who was a team with a target on its’ back?

Macon.

Amid well-funded and veteran organizations, most with specific connections to major-league teams, Macon won last year’s Southeastern tournament to advance to its first Nike MLB RBI World Series.

Now, they’ve gone from under the radar and an underdog to a team with a target on its back.

“Higher expectations this year,” Macon RBI director of baseball Michael Rodgers said. “I think everyone else is expecting a little bit more from us. Certainly the teams that we’re competing against now know to expect a little bit more from us than they’ve gotten in the past.”

The round-robin play began on Friday, with eight teams in each age group.

Macon’s two baseball teams split on Friday’s play, while the softball team went 2-0 with a pair of shutouts

The 15-under team battled its way through the Southeastern tournament last year and was eliminated in the World Series in a 6-5 in a wild action-packed game 13-inning tussle with Durham.

Macon is reaching the point where success is no longer just a hope, but an expectation.

“It’s been a very whirlwind of year,” Rodgers said. “We’ve had a lot of success. We carried it over into the fall as we did workouts.

“We were able to pick up more kids than we picked up in the past to come to those workouts because they had the intention to play with our program this year.”

The team carried some momentum into Jacksonville with a quality tune-up tournament a week earlier in which it scored 13, 10, 12, and 13 runs, in a higher division.

“I hope it’s a confidence booster for them,” Rodgers said. “I hope it’s not an overconfidence booster for them.”

The team is basically new, with Rutland’s Kyle Howard one of the few returnees, along with Bryce Talley. But things have come together mighty well.

“I’m going into this expecting high energy, playing well, and everything,” Howard said. “I’m really happy to go back, and the team that we have right now, I would expect this.

“I enjoy this team right here. We have good chemistry, and we’re working on our chemistry.”

The makeup is geographically diverse, from way beyond Macon.

Come back around dinner time for an update
Friday
Boys 18-u: Macon 11, Tampa Bay Rays 1; Montgomery 7, Macon 1
Boys 15-u: Miami Marlins 6, Macon 1; Macon 16, Papa Jack/Birmingham 4
Softball: Macon 13, Miami Marlins 0; Macon 15, Montgomery 0
Saturday
Boys 18-u: tied Miami 4-4; Macon 14, Atlanta 5; finished tied for third
Boys 15-u: Atlanta Braves 7, Macon 6; Macon 15, Chattanooga 7; finished fourth
Softball: Macon 3, Atlanta Braves 2; Macon 7, Chattanooga 6
Sunday
Softball: 10 a.m., vs. Atlanta, championship

“We have kids from Dublin so a little bit further south,” Rogers said. “We have kids from some of the Atlanta area closer to the southside as well. So we get we have a large area of kids. that we pull from and they have to come together to work.”

Rodgers expected the bus ride and then a cookout sponsored by MLB to help with the team building.

“They'll have an opportunity again to come together as a unit and just to hang out and do some things together,” Rodgers said. “So any kind of team building exercise we can get in, it doesn't have to be formal. We'll do it to make sure that they kind of build a camaraderie.”

And despite the turnover, this year’s team might be better than last year’s.

About MLB Nike RBI
“‘Nike Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities is Major League Baseball’s youth outreach program that provides administrative, programmatic and infrastructural resources and support for organizations that provide baseball and/or softball programming with a focus on underserved kids and communities across the globe.
“Nike RBI has grown from a local program for 180 boys in South Central Los Angeles to an international campaign encompassing more than 200 cities and provides more than 100,000 male and female participants annually the opportunity to play baseball and/or softball.”

“I think that we honestly pound for pound, we might be a better ball club this year,” said Freddie Stewart, president of Macon Nike RBI. “It's just a matter whether or not we can jell together and come and play at the time we need to step up.”

The road to the World Series, though, will be tougher for Macon, because nobody’s overlooking the 478.

“We've come up quite a long way in a short period of time and I think now we are kind of the organization that's on everybody's lips,” Stewart said. “When they talk about a premier program in Middle Georgia, they're talking Macon Nike RBI.”

Howard agrees, and thinks Macon has already developed a level of confidence and consistency.

“It's our defense and offense, but I say our offense is more hidden,” he said. “Sometimes the team will be down but then somebody get a hit, and then it just starts a hit train from there.”