DENNIS SILVA II | STAFF WRITER
MISSION — After tearing his ACL in October 2014, Cesar Rosales’ 2015 baseball season was limited to eight postseason games.
“In the offseason, I just lifted weights,” said Rosales, now a senior. “I lifted and gained weight and just got bigger and stronger.”
Rosales returned to the playoffs in dominant fashion during last weekend’s Class 6A bi-district tussle against Eagle Pass, slugging four home runs in Palmview’s three-game series win.
And he did it while dealing with a sciatic nerve injury in his lower back.
“I tried going for the fence every at-bat,” Rosales said. “If I would’ve hit a groundball, there’s no way I would’ve made it to first base. So I was going for the outfield the whole time.”
Having graduated seven starters from last season, Palmview has surprised by three-peating as a district champion. Pitching, as expected, has been a strength, but the Lobos’ power has come out of nowhere.
The Lobos have 18 home runs and a .526 slugging percentage to accompany a .386 hitting average and .475 on-base percentage heading into their area playoff series against Brownsville Hanna beginning with Game 1 tonight in Brownsville.
“Our mentality is not to hit home runs, it’s just to put the ball in play,” said junior Leo Perez, the team’s ace on the mound who’s also hitting .488 with 31 RBIs and nine homers. “The home runs will come. But when you have guys who can hit, the confidence is through the roof.”
Coach Rick Garcia has changed his team’s approach at the plate. The Lobos (18-10-1) will sit on a fastball to take a breaking ball to the opposite field. They don’t jump on anything, unless the count has two strikes.
“I knew the top of our lineup would be great hitters,” Garcia said. “I just needed the rest of the lineup to come through and work on getting base hits. They’ve done that. That bottom of the lineup, every guy can hit the fastball and we’ve played a lot of small ball that turns out to be base hits and that’s what’s really helped us out.”
Aside from Perez, who is drawing interest from NCAA Division I schools, Palmview’s top hitters saw little time on the field last season. Rosales, hitting .487 with 37 RBIs and five homers, was rusty. Mario Hinojosa, hitting .472 with 19 RBIs and a homer, was a backup who played six games after being moved up from junior varsity midseason.
All have provided power and efficiency in the middle of the order, something that was supposed to be absent with the graduation of Edgar Salinas, Carlos Puente, Jesus Hinojosa and Jose Chapa, all of whom hit .452 or better.
How they’ve done it is because of a lot of time and hard work during the offseason — the Lobos are relentless about conditioning, specifically in the weight room — and practices.
“For the first hour and a half of practice, we’re on the hitting machine,” Hinojosa said. “We’re doing drills, going through stations, coaches are throwing to us. Hitting off tees, soft toss … everything. The whole time, our whole focus is keeping our hands back.”
The Lobos lost almost 60 percent of a starting lineup that hit .418 last season with nine home runs. But they’ve already doubled that home-run total with mostly fresh faces, resulting in third consecutive bi-district and district championships for the eight-year program.
“There was only one word we used all throughout the offseason: tradition,” Garcia said. “That’s what will keep us going. Teams had written us off. All we had was pitching coming back. But these kids don’t want to be that first team to start from the bottom and build up again. You want to surprise people and play as well as you know you can.
“Our kids believed in the tradition.”