Perryville baseball enters districts with newfound optimisim

It's been a lowly three years for the Perryville baseball team prior to 2023.

The momentum of the three straight winning seasons was squashed during the canceled COVID year of 2020. What then followed was seven total wins in 2021 and 2022 combined.

Enter Don O'Keefe, who ushed a new era as Perryville's head baseball coach with the mission of making practices and games fun again and reigniting their competitive confidence.

"We're not the people that get beat up on anymore," O'Keefe said. "Now we can play baseball. So trying to change that mentality and that culture has been our battle the first year."

O'Keefe previously served as the skipper for seven years, including a trip to the district championship game in 2010. He's back to coach his son, sophomore Troy O'Keefe, and to turn the Pirates' ship around.

The Pirates finished the regular season 8-17, including victories over Chaffee (17-9) and Cape Central (14-15). It's a vast improvement compared to the previous two seasons.

Most of their recent losses could be viewed as moral victories given the proper perspective. Through the month of May, the highest margin of defeat has been four. The Pirates have kept many of these games close regardless of the result.

"You can start seeing where they're believing in themselves," O'Keefe said. "This is a program that the expectation was usually you're supposed to just get beat up on and are supposed to lose and get ended in five innings, and you're supposed to make the mistakes. When you look, and you see the record, you start noticing it's a two-run game, a one-run game."

With only one senior on the team, O'Keefe is operating with a blank canvas. Dane Lauck is that lone senior on the team and has gone through all the downs of the previous three years with little ups. He saved his best for senior day on Monday, May 1, when he drove in two runs and threw nine strikeouts in six innings to lead the Pirates past Jefferson 4-3.

"He's that senior that you can put up on a pedestal and say look how hard they're working, look how hard he's going at it," O'Keefe said. "Here's a kid who has gone through four years of this program, COVID the first year, ACL tear the second year and the negative situation they just didn't enjoy the third year. This year it was like don't wish away these games so fast."

Perryville opens the Class 4 District 2 Tournament with a herculean challenge against Herculaneum (11-13) at noon on Saturday, May 13. The Pirates won the first matchup 6-5 thanks to a walk-off single by Dalton Fritsche.

O'Keefe's approach to the postseason is every inning is a game, and every game is a series.

"It's going to be seven innings, and really, it's seven games," O'Keefe said. "So each inning is one ballgame. So our goal is to win the first ballgame and our goal is to win the second ballgame and so on. If we can keep getting every inning that's how we're going to kind of travel through. So we know that even if we lose the first inning 1-0, we win the other games, we win the game."