Rangers Find More Positive Results in 2020 Season

It wasn’t the end to the season they wanted but the Laramie Rangers had an improved season in the second year of manager Aaron Lozano.

Laramie didn’t produce a deep run to the state tournament like the previous two years. Instead, due to some struggles offensively, they went 0-2 and were eliminated by Casper on Day two of the state tournament.

The Rangers finished the season with a 27-26 overall record. That’s an improvement in the win column by 12 over the 2019 season.

Lozano summed it up by saying 2020 was a great year.

“With a lot of adversity, these boys really fought hard. A lot of thanks goes to our Board of Directors and the City of Laramie for making a season happen, and the boys, doing everything they had to do everywhere along the way, wearing masks when they didn’t want to, wearing masks at practice, and hand sanitizer on the bus that doesn’t smell very good. Through it all, these boys fought hard, and you don’t like to end like this but I’d say it was a successful season.”

Laramie loses three seniors, who are all off to play college baseball. Caleb Eaton is heading to Colorado Northwestern, while both Tyler Oppie and Calvin Webb are heading to Dakota Wesleyan.

This means out of the 19 players that participated in a Rangers contest at the ‘AA’ level of Legion baseball, 16 are eligible to return in 2021.

Lozano said, “The guys that we have coming back are going to grow and take that next step. We look forward to next year.”

He added that seeing our three seniors move on to the next level is both awesome for them and us.

“It lets us talk to the young bucks in Laramie, and say, hey, we’ve got a program that’s producing college-level baseball players, come play with us.”

Looking ahead Lozano knows they all need a break to heal up and away from each other for a little bit. He said about Halloween time, they’d start thinking ahead to next season, though some have indicated they may play some fall baseball.

“We go back in and build on what we had. We know we have the offensive potential, it just kind of petered out on us. We’ve got the defense coming along, we’ve got great pitching coming up through the ranks, and we lose Tyler (Oppie), but if you’re building a staff with Ryan Chamberlain, Brandon Chavez, and Garrett Dodd, I think you’re going alright.”

In 2020, as a team, the Rangers had a .305 batting average but it was only .244 over the final month of the season. The pitching staff concluded the year with a 3.44 team ERA. Laramie had 134 errors in 1,469 total fielding chances, for a .909 team fielding percentage. All of the main statistics were an improvement over the 2019 season.