- March 26, 2025
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I pride myself on being an unbiased sports reporter.
I typically find myself rooting for interesting stories and games that finish on time.
However, I’m finding it hard not to pull for the Booker High baseball team.
Booker High School has an impressive history of athletic success, but that’s mostly eluded its baseball team.
On the diamond, the Tornadoes have made the regional playoffs just seven times in the past 44 years and have never won a regional championship.
Some of that playoff success was relatively recent. Booker made it as far as the regional final in 2016 and the regional semifinals in 2019.
Its past few seasons have been as bad as it gets.
Booker owns a 12-60-3 record over the last four seasons, but there’s good reason to believe that woeful stretch is nearing its end.
The Tornadoes (3-2) have already won more times through its first five games this year than all of last season.
It didn’t take any advanced analytics for Booker baseball coach Pat Sweeney to realize he had to do something different this past summer.
The former Riverview High and Holy Cross College baseball player’s first year as a head coach at Booker in 2024 couldn’t have gone much worse.
The Tornadoes went 2-15 last season as a lack of pitching, defense, and baseball fundamentals plagued the team all season.
To top it off, players were also undisciplined.
Sweeney said he had weekly issues with his players running into trouble in school, not taking practice seriously or just skipping it altogether.
Those bad habits are no longer tolerated, and that’s been a game-changer for Booker early this season.
“I know Booker has its reputation,” Sweeney said while watching his players run 30 minutes of laps around the field because a player had acted out in class that day. “It’s not always deserved, in my opinion. It’s just stereotypes, and you get looked at a certain way. It’s just not always the case. We have a group of kids here that are just unbelievable character-wise.”
Sweeney spent the past offseason conceptualizing a way to hold his players accountable. Simply kicking kids off the team didn’t send the right message.
So he created a contract that spelled out the standards he wanted to set, and had each player sign one.
That wasn’t an immediate fix, but players said the way practice is conducted this season is already unrecognizable from last year. Last year Sweeney had just one assistant coach, Lew Johnson, to help him run practice and stay on top of players’ discipline.
This season, Sweeney has added four assistants — his father, Joe Sweeney, Derick Payne, Efren Vaquera and Brian Hubbard Sr.
"This year you can’t stand around," senior Earl 'Scooby' Bethel said. "Last year, we were doing a lot of that standing around. There were guys on their phones during practice. That’s unacceptable. The standard definitely went up."
Discipline and details make a bigger difference in the margins between wins and losses in high school baseball than many may think, but a turnaround can’t happen without talent.
Booker didn’t have problems putting up runs against several teams last year.
The Tornadoes posted a 25-6 win over Gibbs in their first game of the season last year and scored five-plus runs against six other teams.
In hindsight, that first blowout win might’ve been the worst way for them to start the season.
“Everybody was excited. Way too excited,” Bethel said of last year’s season-opening win. “Especially because all of that excitement died down within the next week and it brought us so far down because of how excited we were.”
Senior players Bethel and Zakori Edmond agreed Booker’s first win created complacency and set the bar too high.
When errors, bad innings, and losses came, the immediate reaction was to fold rather than to play through it.
Booker lost to Bayshore 6-5 in its second game last season and then lost the next 10 games in blowout fashion during which it was outscored 145-37.
Coaches and players insist resiliency has replaced false confidence, and that’s largely been due to a freshman class seven players deep that are playing to prove their worth.
A team that hardly won any games last year can’t make a one-year turnaround simply because of better discipline.
An infusion of talent was sorely needed at Booker, and Sweeney said this year’s freshman class is better than he could’ve anticipated.
“Historically Booker hasn’t had a lot of guys with a lot of baseball experience, but now we have a young core with a lot of playing experience,” he said. “They honestly fell out of the sky. It was the greatest blessing that fell into my lap.”
Sweeney said he wasn’t sure what to expect coming into this season, but he realized right away that he had some new impact players on his hands.
The Tornadoes are rostering seven freshmen this season, and a few of them have been top players early.
Freshman Dameer Watford is batting .500 with four runs and five RBIs. Freshman Gabe Bragg is hitting .357 with three runs and two RBIs.
The biggest difference-maker so far has been freshman Addiel Martinez. He’s been Booker’s ace so far, with a 2-1 record, a 2.94 ERA and 23 strikeouts in 16 ⅔ innings pitched.
The strong start is encouraging, but the biggest reason that Booker could make some noise this year is that they’re not satisfied with what they’ve done yet.
“We’re excited,” Bethel said. “But (three wins) is nothing. We want to be district champs.”
