BASEBALL: Bears well-stocked in arms race

A.J. Bogucki

Dan Woodley

Tyler Bauman

By Darryl Grumling
dgrumling@pottsmerc.com
Twitter: @MercSmokinD

If you believe the old adage that baseball is "90 percent pitching," Boyertown figures to be a handful in the Pioneer Athletic Conference this spring.
Veteran Bears coach Todd Moyer has a well-stocked mound arsenal that should make the defending PAC-10 champs the team to beat.
For starters, there's University of North Carolina-bound ace right-hander A.J. Bogucki - last year's All-Area Player of the Year. The 6-foot-3, 200-pound Bogucki, who went 6-1 with a 2.94 ERA and 74 strikeouts in 52.3 innings, is No. 68 on the MaxPreps.com Top 100 high school baseball senior rankings for this year and is the top-ranked scholastic player in Pennsylvania by prepbaseballreport.com.
But the Bears' mound corps goes well beyond their top gun.
Senior left-hander Dan Woodley would be a No. 1 on virtually any other team in the state. Woodley, who is headed to East Stroudsburg, went 5-3 with a 1.98 ERA and 51 strikeouts over 35.1 innings last year.
If that's not enough, lefties Tyler Bauman and Brandon Griesemer and righties Mitch Renninger and Luke Stong provide all kinds of situational options for Moyer.
Bauman, who tossed two innings of two-strikeout, one-hit shutout relief to get the save in Wednesday's league-opening 3-2 win over Perkiomen Valley could be the sleeper on a staff that will be tough to solve should the Bears' lineup figure out a way to score some runs.

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