Top Collegiate Baseball Conference Well Represented On Anglers

CHATHAM – Earlier this year during the college baseball season, Georgia traveled over to Texas for an April weekend series between conference opponents. The visiting Bulldogs got swept by the Longhorns.

So when Daniel Jackson, a Georgia catcher and outfielder, thinks about Texas — well, “we don’t like them,” he said. And yet fellow Angler and Texas infielder Ethan Mendoza is one of Jackson’s favorite people up here with him in Chatham. The two Southeastern Conference players are foes in the spring, Cape League teammates in the summer.

“He’s just an awesome dude, and it’s cool to just interact with others, especially when you know you’re going to see them again this coming spring,” Jackson said.

There is perhaps no town on the Cape where that dynamic of SEC opponents coalescing into a summer league team is more prevalent than in Chatham. Dennis Cook’s Anglers include the most players that appeared on an SEC roster this year of any Cape League team. The 12 SEC players of 32 total Anglers at this point in the season is also the largest proportion in the league.

The SEC — home to schools like Vanderbilt, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Louisiana State and Ole Miss — could generally be viewed as the most competitive college baseball conference in the country. 

Usually considered more often for its football prowess, an SEC program has won the last six Men’s College World Series titles, and seven of the last eight. That level of play bodes well for a league as strong as the Cape, where six of the last seven first overall picks in the Major League Baseball draft have played.  

“You’re playing against some of the best competition,” Jackson said. “I feel like it prepares you to come up here.”

The Anglers roster has already seen four players from Georgia and four from Mississippi State, in addition to individual players from other conference schools, like Ashton Larson, who in June just won the College World Series as an LSU Tiger. 

“You remember your at-bats against these guys and how you pitched them, and you get to talk about it, too,” Georgia righthander JT Quinn said. “I think it’s really helpful, honestly.”

Some players have already come and gone. Quinn, an MLB draft-eligible prospect, made three starts and returned home. Mississippi State’s Ace Reese hit a game-tying three-run home run with two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning against the Harwich Mariners last Saturday, then departed to play for Team USA days later.

“Seeing Ace Reese hitting bombs against us and then seeing him on our team, it’s a whole different vibe,” Mendoza said.

The SEC’s official slogan is “It just means more.” The Cape League’s motto is that it’s where “the stars of tomorrow shine tonight.” There are, of course, numerous talented players from other collegiate athletic conferences on the Anglers and throughout the Cape League. The Anglers just want to get the best players, and they’re not all in the SEC, Cook said.

But a lot of them — the stars of tomorrow shining through summer nights on the Cape — are in the SEC. A lot of them are in Chatham.