Lansing’s Undefeated Season: 10 Years later

A decade ago, Lansing baseball completed one of the most impressive seasons possible. The Bobcats played 26 games and won 26 games en route to the program’s first and only State Championship. Led by New York State Coach of the Year Stu Dean and New York State Player of the Year Sean Streb, the Bobcats did the improbable.

A season in Major League Baseball lasts 162 games, the longest in professional sports, to eliminate the impact of unlikely losses. It’s built specifically this way because baseball is a game built on chance and failure in which the worst teams can beat the best teams on any given day. To go an entire season at any level without dropping a single game is quite simply an anomaly. Streb talked about the self-belief the team felt as the year went on.

“We just had this confidence in our at-bats that we were always going to hit off of whoever came at us,” Streb said. “We were kind of heavy hitters all the way down through the lineup. It was just the level of confidence we had throughout the season knowing going into games that this is a team that we’re probably going to blow out. We took that confidence into the playoffs.”

The stats back up Streb’s statement. The team hit .342 as a whole with seven players hitting over .300 as the Bobcats outscored their opponents 267-63. A margin of over 200 runs in just 26 games.

To be that successful, there has to be a great mind leading the way. Dean, a recent Section IV Hall of Fame inductee, was just that. He shared the philosophy he had that season.

“Instead of looking at the big picture, we talked about winning the inning,” Dean said. “We figured if we won enough innings, we’d win the game. In the end, it really benefited us because we had situations where we did get behind in big games and we were able to come back and score that next half inning, putting us in a better position to be victorious.”

Arguably the two biggest tests of the season came in championship games against local opponents. There was a 1-0 win over Waverly in the IAC Championship and a thrilling 12-11 win over Thomas A. Edison in the Section IV Championship. It was the win over Waverly that made Dean believe the team could go far.

“That was the moment that I felt like we had a possibility of being pretty good,” he said. “We saw a really good pitcher that day and we didn’t hit and we found a way to manufacture one run. Benji [Parkes] had a no-hitter that day, so we were fortunate to get the pitching aspect of it. We played good defense almost the entire year. For us to squeeze that by and win that game, I felt like we had an opportunity to put something good together in the postseason.”

As good as the hitting was, the pitching was simply dominant as well. As a whole, the team’s ERA was an absurd 1.71 with Streb and Parkes leading the way. They both owned ERAs under 1.00 and were as good of a one-two punch on the mound as possible. Streb talked about the team’s pitching (and defensive) success.

“Benji and I both threw strikes,” Streb said. “I wouldn’t say I was the hardest throwing kid at the time, but we had a great defense behind me. When either of us were on the mound, we barely gave up any errors. I know that was something that Stu was always talking to us about. Everybody on the infield and the outfield wanted the ball to get hit to them because they knew they were going to make the play.”

Of course, an undefeated season requires plenty of hard work. Dean had the right group of athletes that were hungry to put in the extra time necessary to be crowned as the best in New York.

“It was a lot of fun,” Dean said. “We enjoyed the opportunity to practice each day. Coming to practice was an honor for me because the kids came willing to work hard. There were guys that stayed after and Mike Herzog would throw extra [batting practice] after practice. We had a great group of kids who really embraced the idea of working hard.”

This past season, the Lansing baseball team continued the tradition of success by winning the Section IV Championship for the first time since 2018. Similar to soccer, the sport of baseball is one in which you can count on Lansing being at the top of the standings. In 2012, though, there was not a single team that could claim they were better than the Bobcats.

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