Tigers take on Wolverines in Friday's season opener

The Mountain Home Tigers open their 2011 baseball season Friday with a doubleheader at home against the Wood River Wolverines.

Mark Cotton takes over from Travis DeVore as head coach of the Tigers this year. Cotton, who previously has served as an assistant coach and who also is a former MHHS Tiger, liked the numbers he had out for baseball this season.

"We got about 28 kids out -- 14 on varsity and 14 on the JV -- and we had a better turnout this year as far as kids coming out, so that's good," the coach said.

The team has just four players back from last year's squad that went 15-11 overall.

"We lost a lot of seniors last year, but I think that the young guys that are coming up, they played a long summer of Legion ball and I think they made some big strides. Hopefully, we can progress quickly and start winning some games early in the season."

As young as his Tigers are, Cotton thinks that pitching is a definite strong point on this year's squad.

"We've got a good one-two punch with Jared Day and Alex Rodriguez, or whichever order you want to put that in. They both threw really well for us last summer. I think starting pitching is going to be a strength."

But, he said, "we've still got to develop our bullpen a little bit. Gage Curtis, Skylar Quintal and Jake Hennessey's going to come in and start throwing for us in some middle-inning relief and stuff like that, so we're going to experiment and see what we can do with our bullpen."

Cotton thinks they should also be able to hit the ball fairly well this year.

"I think the middle of our line-up's going to hit well. I think offensively, that two-through-seven range is going to do real well. We're still trying to find a lead-off guy for us, and find some people on the back half of that order to come through for us. but it's still early. I still haven't seen these guys a whole lot. It's only three days into it, but I like the attitudes I've seen out here -- guys are working hard and hopefully that continues throughout the season, and if that's the case, I definitely think we're going to get better and we'll have a chance to compete at district."

With the Tigers opening their season Friday against Wood River, Coach Cotton plans on seeing what his squad can do in the non-conference games.

"It's early in the season and you never really know. We're going to kind of platoon it with our pitchers and get as many guys on the bump as we can, get some good looks at our guys and use these non-conference games as kind of a measuring stick of where we're really at, because it's really hard to tell right now, but we'll see."

Coach Cotton points to Bishop Kelly as being one of the teams to beat in conference this year.

"It's kind of hard to tell (who will be strong), but Bishop Kelly's always going to be tough. They just kind of reload every year. I think a team to really watch out for is Middleton. They have so many kids coming out for their program and they seem to be getting better every single year. They were pretty young last year. I know they return a lot of guys, so I think Middleton's going to be a really tough team, so we'll see what happens.

"You just never really know until the season gets going and you start looking at scores around the league," he added.