The beginning third of the Florida State League’s second half of the season has belonged to … the Daytona Tortugas?
Daytona finished the first half 21-45 with a run differential 150 ticks in the red. Believe it or not, that wasn’t a recipe for success, and the Tortugas found themselves 16 games behind first place, 12 behind their closest East Division counterpart and 9½ behind the FSL’s ninth-place team.
Luckily for Daytona, the Florida State League resets all records after the first half of the calendar as part of its split-season setup, allowing the second-half champion in the East and West to secure playoff bids.
The Tortugas have taken full advantage.
Daytona is 14-8 with a positive 29-run advantage over its opponents. There’s still a long way to go, but the Tortugas are already distancing themselves from third-place St. Lucie and fourth-place Jupiter, the first half winner.
It’s all been because of a team-wide hitting overhaul.
Baseball is simple in theory — the more runs a team scores, the higher the probability that team will win. The Tortugas weren’t following that in the first half as the only FSL team to score fewer than 300 runs and allow more than 400.
But Daytona has flipped the narrative through its first 22 second-half games.
The Tortugas’ latest conquest was a three-game sweep over Jupiter from July 17-19, with all three victories seeing Daytona score at least seven runs. It’s been a common theme for the Tortugas post-record reset with 13 games with at least seven runs, resulting in 12 of their 14 wins in the current half.
Nobody’s even been close to Daytona’s success at the plate.
Jalen Hairston leads all FSL players over the past 30 days with a whopping .403 batting average, but he’s far from the only Tortuga near the top of the leaderboard.
Ty Doucette (.358), Bernard Moon (.339) and Ichiro Cano (.338) rank second, fourth and fifth in the league over the same time period. Moon (.475) and Doucette (.458) also rank second and fifth, respectively, in on-base percentage, and Cano and outfielder Arnaldo Lantigua are two of three players with 20 RBIs in the last month.
It’s a vast improvement from the beginning of the season, as most Tortugas are absent from the top 10 in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and practically every hitting stat for the year to date.
Daytona has also been without the star hitter it did have during the first half of the season, catcher Jacob Friend, who was promoted to the High-A Dayton Dragons at the end of May.
That hasn’t seemed to matter much with Daytona’s FSL-best .294 batting average, Doucette’s 21-game on-base streak and an improvement on the mound turning the Tortugas into an early candidate to snatch a playoff spot in the second half of the season.
Daytona will look to continue its winning ways with a six-game road series against the Clearwater Threshers beginning on July 21.
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: How the Daytona Tortugas became the Florida State League’s hottest team
Reporting by Zach Allen, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Zach Allen, Daytona Beach News-Journal | USA TODAY Network
