If you painted Brother Rice’s baseball season by the numbers, Jack Carmody and Bob Dempster would blend into the background.
Carmody, the team’s No. 4 starter, is 3-2 with a 5.60 earned-run average. Dempster, a designated hitter and pinch-hitter, has 58 at-bats in 39 games.
If you look at the big picture, though, it’s clear Brother Rice would not be headed for its first Class AA quarterfinal appearance in 24 years without the two. Statistics can’t show the crucial leadership role each has played for a 22-man team on which they are, amazingly, the only seniors.
“They have showed us how to do it,” junior second baseman Mike McQuillan said.
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The most useful thing they have demonstrated is how to put team before self, even in the face of personal disappointment.
Like most athletes, Carmody and Dempster aimed to be full-time starters when they arrived at Brother Rice, and each accomplished that on the freshman and sophomore levels. Lurking a year behind them, however, was a talented group that would provide six players for the varsity last season as sophomores and 13 players this year.
That helped relegate Carmody and Dempster to the bench in 2006, with the former pitching just 14 innings in five games and the latter getting only five at-bats. Many of their 23 teammates from the 2004 freshmen team had seen the playing-time handwriting on the wall and exited after the ’05 season, and others were cut, leaving the varsity with just six juniors last spring.
Carmody and Dempster were going to stick around as long as Brother Rice coach Tim Lyons would have them and accept the consequences without complaint.
“It was kind of an adjustment not pitching every five days and all that, but I never had the attitude that I have to be playing right now and I’ll be mad if I’m not,” Carmody said of last season. “As long as we have success I didn’t mind that much, and I knew other pitchers were as good if not better than I was, so I understood my role.”
That role expanded to 11 games and 26 innings this year but didn’t fulfill Carmody’s ambitions. He trailed not only junior Ryan Wischhover in the rotation but also sophomore Pat Gannon and freshman Kevin Koziol.
Dempster, meanwhile, has started a handful of games among the 32 in which he has appeared, producing 18 hits, 17 runs batted in and a .310 batting average.
When seniors sit behind younger players, it can breed discontent and poison team chemistry. Carmody has not appeared in Brother Rice’s five postseason games, but he has stayed positive and tried to contribute by helping devise pitching strategy.
“Whatever would help make the team win,” he said.
Victory also cures all ills for Dempster.
“My role is whatever Coach wants me to do,” he said of Lyons. “Come in and bunt, get a sacrifice fly, get a hit, go get water … whatever he gives me.
“Of course I want to play, but it just makes me work harder; and when I do get chances to play it means more.”
It meant plenty against Minooka in a supersectional game Monday at Hawkinson Ford Field in Crestwood when Dempster pinch-hit in the top of the seventh inning with the score tied 3-3. Gannon had just walked, and Dempster bunted courtesy runner Tom Rynne to second, from where Rynne scored the go-ahead run on McQuillan’s double in a 7-3 victory.
“No one will remember what Bob did,” McQuillan said, “and it pretty much put us in position to win the game.”
Brother Rice (29-10) will play Dundee-Crown in the quarterfinals Friday at Silver Cross Field in Joliet with by far the youngest team in the field. It figured to be a year away from such glory, but Lyons was hopeful after seeing his players — more than half of whom were varsity newcomers — start to bond last summer.
With six sophomores, one freshman and so few seniors, though, he emphasized at a preseason meeting he would not tolerate age discrimination.
“We made it clear seniors won’t get any special treatment and freshmen will not get any special harassment, and we laughed at that,” Lyons said. “But true to form, the kids bought into it and accepted it.”
Team chemistry nonetheless was a work in progress, but by late in this season it was strong enough to hold up when Brother Rice lost five of its last 11 regular-season games.
Carmody and Dempster have been a steadying force throughout, whether it has been by calming a young player’s nerves, dispensing a tip or leading the cheering from the bench. That helps explain why they are among the team’s five captains and recently were co-recipients of an annual team award for effort and attitude.
“Jack and Bobby are what this program is all about,” Lyons said.
It’s nice when your coaches love you but even better when your teammates do, so the ultimate accolade may be the way Brother Rice’s young guns have tried to make the season linger for their senior citizens.
“The whole year we’ve been talking we don’t want these two guys to end their high school careers with coulda, shoulda,” McQuillan said. “They’re just leaders, and it’s nice to have people like that around.”
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