Three months ago, Oldsmobile Park was not a very fun place to be.
The Lansing Lugnuts were horrible - especially at home - and the spirits of sparse crowds that showed up were usually dampened by inclement weather, bad baseball or both.
Fast forward to Tuesday night.
Minutes after the playoff-bound Lugnuts secured a 4-2 win over South Bend in their regular-season home finale, the team’s players and management teamed up to give the excited crowd of 10,693 a big thank you.
Reliever Scott Fries basically summed up the players’ excitement about Monday night’s clinching of a playoff berth by sprinting around the empty basepaths and sliding head-first into home plate - much to the delight of the crowd, which was then inundated with a fireworks show to cap off Fan Appreciation Night.
“The guys were betting me I wouldn’t do it,” Fries said of his jaunt. “It was fun, it got the crowd going. Things like that wouldn’t have happened in the first half of the season.”
The first half was miserable for most of the team as they floundered to a last-place 27-43 record. But the Midwest League reset its standings at the All-Star break on June 18, and the fresh start seemed get the Lugnuts back on track.
The Lugnuts are the Class A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs.
“The first half of the season, we just couldn’t get any breaks,” Fries said. “The second half, we’ve been getting more of our breaks and that’s been the big difference. We’re playing well, both offensively and defensively.”
Well enough to make the three-round playoffs that start Sept. 4 at Oldsmobile Park. Lansing’s best-of-three first-round opponent is yet to be determined, but it will either be first-place Michigan or second-place Dayton.
Whichever one it is, Lansing (37-26 in the second half) should still have momentum. The team has won 18 of its last 22 games - an amazing feat to anyone who watched them in the season’s mistake-ridden opening months.
“We started off the second half just wanting to get to .500,” Garcia said. “Then we started getting on a pretty big roll. In the first half, we’d get behind or make a couple errors in an inning and it would open the floodgates for the other team.
“I can’t tell you the exact date (when things started turning around), but there were a few series where we started beating teams three out of four. In the first half, we’d get swept or win one of the four. In the second half, we started to win three against the good clubs. That really opened the guys’ eyes.”
A vast improvement of the starting rotation and a much more effective defense are two of the major reasons Lansing is headed to the post-season, Garcia said.
After starting off 3-9, Todd Wellemeyer has won 10 straight decisions, including Tuesday’s win over South Bend. Garcia won’t officially dub Wellemeyer as the Game 1 playoff starter yet, but he realizes he has a bona fide staff ace.
“We’re going to try (to start Wellemeyer in Game 1), but we don’t know if it’s going to work out,” Garcia said. “If it doesn’t, we’ll just go with whoever’s turn it is.
“The key is to get to the playoffs and then anything can happen. Everyone’s 0-0, and we have as good of a shot as anybody.”
Defensively, the Lugnuts have tightened up a unit that was suspect early on.
“In the first half, we would sometimes make four or five errors in a game, but there’s nothing like that now,” Fries said.
The Lugnuts conclude their regular season with a four-game series at division-leading Michigan this week and a two-game set at Fort Wayne on Sept. 2-3.
