MSL Baseball: Former Fremd Star Kating Builds a 300-Game Baseball Winner at South Elgin
Checking In On Locals in the Minor Leagues; Harper Baseball Gets Combined No-Hitter and Two Players Play All Nine Positions
Jim Kating was one of the best three-sport athletes to come out of the Mid-Suburban League at Fremd. Kating also played for three of the best head coaches in league history in Joe Samojedny, Mo Tharp and Terry Gellinger.
So, Kating’s success as the only head baseball coach in South Elgin history should be no surprise. Kating, who led Fremd to the 1984 Class AA baseball state tournament, earned his 300th career victory when the Storm beat Larkin 12-0 on Wednesday.
“Well it took us 16 years, a missing Covid season and in season No. 17, win No. 300 came today,” longtime South Elgin assistant coach Ben Erickson posted on Facebook. “Congratulations to Coach Jim Kating and the rest of the coaching staff. Couldn’t think of a better group of baseball guys to freeze to death with!”
Kating has built a successful program from its foundation since South Elgin’s first varsity season with no seniors in 2007. That was also his only losing season as he has won more than 62 percent of his games. His 2014 team finished third in Class 4A with Ryan Nutof, now pitching with the Reds’ Triple-A Louisville affiliate, and shortstop Dane Toppel, who played at Eastern Illinois.
“I’m very proud of how they’ve handled themselves and gone through this,” Kating told the Daily Herald’s Jerry Fitzpatrick after winning the first state trophy in any sport for South Elgin. “I think this group has now set the tradition and the standard and the expectation for us going far in the state playoffs. Through this experience, hopefully, my program can build and become one of the best programs in the state.”
That has been the case as last year’s team and the 2017 supersectional qualifier won 25 games. Kating has had five regional championship teams and seven 20-win seasons. Getting victory No. 1 took six tries and it ironically occurred in his old MSL backyard, 10-6 in 6 innings at Conant.
“It’s a relief,” Kating said in the Herald. “It’s good to get this one out of the way and get the monkey off our backs.”
Kating was the Herald’s All-Area baseball captain in 1984 with a Fremd team that included all-area picks in first baseman Jeff Bossong, shortstop Dave Eck and pitcher Rob McCormack and reached the Elite Eight in Springfield. Gellinger, who retired after that season and led the first MSL team to the state tournament at Fremd in 1979, offered a glimpse into some of the attributes that allowed Kating to get the most out of himself and his teammates.
“I’ve often felt that him being such a sociable-type person has had a positive effect on everybody,” Gellinger told the Herald’s Keith Reinhard. “He’s certainly been a leader on the field too. Last year I asked him to play third base for us and he unselfishly agreed. You never get enough of his caliber of player.”
Kating was also an all-area tight end in football who played outside linebacker and punted and Samojedny, who won 94 games in 19 seasons, said “wherever we put him he was successful.” Kating played on 7-2 and 6-3 teams that didn’t make the playoffs in an era where qualification standards were much stricter. He was also all-MSL in basketball for Tharp, who won 406 games in 27 years and claimed the league’s first boys basketball state trophy with a fourth-place finish in 1993.
Kating was drafted in the 30th round by the Cubs but opted to go to Southern Illinois, where he played one season and hit over .300. After an NJCAA All-American sophomore season at Triton College where he hit .400 with 25 homers, Kating was drafted by and signed with the Dodgers. In five years in the Dodgers and A’s organizations he hit .265 and got as high as Class AA.
He came back to coach at Fremd and spent eight years as an underclass coach at Bartlett before getting his head coaching shot at the new school in South Elgin. Kating started the building process by coaching the sophomore team in his first year.
“It’s been one of my dreams, one of my goals since I came back into education, to get my own program and steer it and see what happens,” Kating told Fitzpatrick before South Elgin’s first varsity season in 2007. “I think I’m able to communicate with kids and I think I have a lot to offer through my experiences. If you can get kids to play together to play as a team, to trust each other at the high school level, you can go places and do some things.”
Trips to places like Joliet for the state tournament and Schaumburg for supersectionals are evidence South Elgin baseball has done some special things under Jim Kating.
Minor Matters
An update on some area players in the minor leagues:
Pitcher Ryan Loutos (Barrington) was promoted to the Cardinals’ AAA Memphis team and got a win over Indianapolis earlier this week with 2 scoreless innings of 2-hit relief with 4 strikeouts and no walks. He has made 2 appearances for Memphis after pitching twice at AA Springfield (Mo.).
Outfielder Mike Tauchman (Fremd) is hitting .343 with 2 homers and 10 RBI at the Cubs’ AAA Iowa affiliate.
Pitcher Ryan Borucki (Mundelein) is 1-0 with a 4.26 ERA in 6 relief appearances at AAA Iowa. He has 8 strikeouts in 6⅓ innings.
Pitcher Eric Stout (St. Francis) has a 4.15 ERA with 5 strikeouts and 5 walks in 4⅓ innings at the Mariners’ AAA Tacoma club.
Pitcher Ryan Nutof (South Elgin) is 0-1 with 1 save, a 3.00 ERA and 5 strikeouts in 6 innings and 7 appearances for the Reds’ AAA Louisville affiliate. In 2022, Nutof made 4 appearances in AAA and went 6-2 with a 2.96 ERA, 2 saves and 64 strikeouts in 54⅔ innings at AA Chattanooga.
Third baseman Brett Harris (Hersey) is hitting .302 with 1 homer and 7 RBI in 43 at-bats and has a .455 on-base percentage for the A’s AA Midland (Texas) affiliate.
Pitcher Quinn Gudaitis (Hersey) is 2-0 with a 1.59 ERA and 4 strikeouts in 4 games (5⅔ innings) at the Tigers’ A Lakeland (Florida) affiliate.
Pitcher Mike Danielak (Hersey) placed himself on the voluntarily retired list March 28 after a five-year minor league career in the A’s system where he went 14-7 with 8 saves and a 3.54 ERA. Danielak was 4-3 with 3 saves and a 3.98 ERA in 41 games last season at AA Midland.
Tyler Ladendorf (Maine West) and Steve Pollakov (Buffalo Grove) are working as instructors in the Cubs’ minor-league system. Pollakov is one of the organization’s hitting coordinators and Ladendorf is the development coach with the AA Tennessee Smokies. Ladendorf played in 53 games with the A’s in 2015-16 and made his final big-league appearance with the Cubs in 2021.
Fantastic Feats for Harper Baseball
Harper College baseball, led by former Buffalo Grove star Nelson Gord, had a couple of memorable moments earlier this month. The first occurred April 4 when Jermaine Salcedo (Rolling Meadows) and Brandon West (Lake View) pitched a combined no-hitter in a 6-4 victory in 7 innings over Olive-Harvey.
Salcedo and West pulled it off despite a combined 10 walks and 4 hit batters and Olive-Harvey actually led 4-2 after a 4-run fifth. Salcedo went the first 4⅓ innings with 5 strikeouts and West got the victory with 2 strikeouts in 2⅔ innings as Harper regained the lead with a 4-run sixth.
In a 13-12 win over the North Central JV this week, sophomores Sean Holbrook (Niles West) and Tyler Spiecker (Romeoville) played all nine positions. Holbrook was the winning pitcher as he needed just 6 pitches for a 1-2-3 eighth and Spiecker got the save as he struck out the first two hitters, walked the next three but ended the game with a flyout.
Playing all nine positions almost didn’t happen for Holbrook and Spiecker because Harper was in danger of falling victim to the 10-run rule as it trailed 12-2 entering the seventh inning and 12-10 going into the ninth. Holbrook’s leadoff walk started a 6-run seventh and Spiecker’s walk and Holbrook’s hit by pitch started a rally in the ninth where Schaumburg’s Justin Gadomski hit a go-ahead bases-loaded triple with two outs to cap a 5-RBI game.
News-Gazette All-State Girls Basketball Honors
MSL standouts Katie Eidle (Hersey) and Sophie Swanson (Barrington) and Emily Fisher (Libertyville) and Lenee Beaumont (Benet) were part of the 15-player first team on the Champaign News-Gazette’s 46th annual all-state girls basketball team. All four players will be competing against each other in the Big Ten Conference with Eidle headed to Michigan, Swanson to Purdue, Fisher to Maryland and Beaumont to Indiana.
Second-team selections included Peyton Gerdes (Grayslake North), Emory Klatt (Stevenson) and Jordan Wood (Carmel). Wood is headed to Michigan State.
Myers Goes the Distance for Charity
Mike Myers, whose 13-year big-league career as a relief pitcher ended with the 2007 White Sox, completed his second Boston Marathon for charity in 5 hours, 59 minutes and 31 seconds. Myers, a 1987 Cyrstal Lake Central graduate who went to Hersey for his first two years of high school, raised $9,435 of his seven-runner group’s $44,782 for The Angel Fund for ALS research. He also pitched for the 2004 World Series champion Red Sox.
Other notable runners to complete the 26.2-mile race were ex-Cub pitcher Ryan Dempster, Boston College legend and NFL quarterback Doug Flutie and former Boston Bruins defenseman Zdeno Chara.
Hersey’s Roberts Becomes a Bulldog
Former Hersey basketball star Ethan Roberts announced his decision Wednesday to play for Missouri Valley Conference tournament champion Drake. The 6-foot-5 Roberts entered the transfer portal after he was named Patriot League Rookie of the Year at Army where he averaged 12.4 points and 4.4 rebounds a game and had shooting percentages of 47.6 from the field, 40.7 from 3-point range and 84.8 on free throws.
Roberts joins a team that returns 6-7 MVC player of the year Tucker DeVries and guard Conor Enright (Mundelein), who made the MVC’s all-freshman team. Drake finished 26-7 after it had an 8-point lead with less than five minutes to go in its NCAA tournament opener but lost 63-56 to eventual Final Four qualifier Miami.
Jake Wolfe (Aurora Christian) will play his grad transfer year in the MVC at Indiana State after playing at Lipscomb and Morehead State. Wolfe’s dad Todd starred at Arlington and Prospect and played at Michigan State. Six-10 Kyle Thomas (Benet) transferred to Bradley after averaging 5.2 points a game as a freshman at Eastern Illinois.
What a great article on Jim Kating! He would have been all-state in Lacrosse too.....if they had it!