Vennum in control

Andy Vennum always has put good movement on a baseball.

The left-handed senior has been a starting pitcher for the Eagles since his freshman season at West Valley High School. Like most southpaws, the balls he throws have a tendency to move and dance on their way to home plate.

“I’ve always had pretty good movement on my pitches,” Vennum said. “This year I’ve been working hard to get my velocity up, but I still get pretty good hop on my fastball.”

“I remember the first game he started for us back when he was a freshman,” West Valley coach Don O’Neal said. “He pitched a complete game against Gonzaga Prep and they couldn’t touch him.”

But the best movement he’s gotten so far will now take him far beyond home plate. It will take him to Montana State University in Billings. Vennum has committed to play baseball for the NCAA Division II Bobcats. He hopes that, before it’s all said and done, the Bobcats will commit to him in the form of an athletic scholarship.

“It’s the right fit for me,” Vennum said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

His coach isn’t mincing words about the fit.

“I told the coach over there that he’s getting himself quite a player,” O’Neal said. “I expect Andy to be a two-way player for them right off the bat.”

One of the odd maxims about the game of baseball is the left-handed pitcher. What right-handers spend ages learning how to do, the lefty does naturally. Old-time coaches like to joke about how southpaws are just born with a crooked arm – helping them throw crooked pitches.

Players still talk about the exploding sliders thrown by Randy Johnson and hall-of-famer Steve Carlton – pitches that allegedly moved faster than the eye could perceive.

Vennum’s fastball doesn’t move into that category, but his ball does abhor following a straight line from his release point to the catcher’s glove.

“The thing about Andy is that the ball actually moves even more when he’s a little tired,” O’Neal said. “He’s actually harder to hit the later he goes in games.”

Vennum has worked hard to improve both his stamina and his velocity for his senior season.

“Andy has really improved from last year to this,” the coach said. “He’s worked hard. He worked with his pitching coach three nights a week over the winter, and it shows.”

The biggest change, Vennum said, has been in his command of the plate.

“The thing I’ve concentrated on is keeping hitters from crowding the plate,” he said. “I started doing that toward the end of last year, but my pitching coach really drummed that into my head over the winter. I have to be able to control the inside corner of the plate to be effective.”

That command, however, meant the difference between a no-hitter and a perfect game.

Vennum was at his best at Riverside in a Great Northern League showdown. He had not allowed a single runner to reach first base through the first four innings.

“They’d been really crowding the plate the whole game,” Vennum said. “I threw inside, just off the plate, to the first guy up in the fifth and he just stood there. He watched the ball him him.”

With a runner on first, Vennum then retired the next three batters he faced to complete the no-hitter.

With Vennum and fellow senior Bryan Peterson leading the way, the Eagles are 9-1 in the GNL going into a scheduled weekend series with Cheney.

“We ended up losing a game to Pullman that I don’t think we should have lost,” he said.

With make-up dates still wreaking havoc on the standings, Cheney is two games behind West Valley in the win column (7-1) going into the weekend showdown series. Each team has one league loss going in. Pullman, at 6-2, is in third place.

“The thing about pitching for this team is that I wouldn’t be anywhere without the guys I have playing behind me,” Vennum said. “Seriously, I think this is the best team we’ve had in my four years here. They do a great job of making plays behind me. I appreciate each and every one of them.

“The thing is, we have a bunch of young players on this team. We’ve worked hard to make sure they know how much we need them and how much we want them to succeed.”

That’s a lesson Vennum learned first-hand.

“There were some players who really went out of their way to make me feel a part of the team when I was a freshman and a sophomore,” he said. “I still talk to those guys, and they still come watch us play when they can.

“It’s part of what we do to give something back to the team and to the program.”