Winning followed Enns around in 2022

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This article was published 25/10/2022 (1256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ty Enns may have a tough time duplicating what he’s experienced in the last few months.

The 24-year-old baseball and hockey player was named Baseball Manitoba’s senior player of the year after his Cartwright Twins won the senior AA championship and also earned the Border Baseball League’s title in an epic five-game series with the Morden Mud Hens.

“I was pretty excited,” said Enns, who was unable to attend the awards ceremony in Brandon on Saturday as he begins his second college hockey season with the Adrian College Bulldogs in Michigan. “There were a lot of guys who could have won something like that but I was excited. Pitching as much as I do and putting up the stats I did at the plate, a lot of guys probably did pretty close to what I did or were in the same realm, but I think what pushed me over the edge was how much our team won this year. That was really nice. You can’t win on your own.”

On top of his success on the diamond, Enns also had a year on the rink, winning an NCAA Division III national championship with Adrian College last March while leading the team in goals with 20 in just 31 games.

But winning isn’t exactly new to Enns. On the ball diamond, he’s won western Canadian championships, at the junior level with the Brandon Junior Marlins in 2017 and at the midget AA division with Rock Lake. His teams captured provincial titles in bantam and midget baseball, and Pilot Mound also picked him up for senior AA provincials in 2019.

On the ice, he was part of the Pembina Valley Hawks team that beat the Brandon Wheat Kings in overtime in Game 5 to win the 2015 Manitoba U18 AAA Hockey League title, and earned a Manitoba Junior Hockey League championship with the Portage Terriers in 2017. He’s also won a pair of conference crowns and the national title in college hockey,

“It’s pretty ridiculous at this point,” Enns said with a laugh. “Hopefully I can keep doing it because it’s fun. It’s never fun losing.”

Enns grew up a terrific two-sport athlete.

He played in the MJHL with the Waywayseecappo Wolverines and Terriers, and also spent time with the North American Hockey League’s Bismarck Bobcats, Alberta Junior Hockey League’s Bonnyville Pontiacs and Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League’s Kindersley Klippers.

After two seasons at NCAA DIII Marian University, he transferred to Adrian College for the 2021-22 season.

In the era of the 12-month, single-sport athlete, Enns is a refreshing change. He can’t imagine giving up hockey or baseball.

“I like having a change of pace,” Enns said. “I play hockey for eight, nine months of the year and then I come home for the summer and it’s nice to step into the ball field in the sunshine and the nice weather outdoors and hang out with a different group of guys that I don’t hang out with during the winter. I always enjoy baseball, it’s a lot of fun, and I enjoy hockey too.”

He played a couple of ball games with the senior AA Twins when he was 17 and they were short of players, but didn’t start full time with them until 2018 when he was 20. He joined a talented cohort of young athletes from the area who were always competitive but weren’t quite able to succeed on the biggest stages.

In a pair of provincial senior A finals, they lost to the Comets in Rivers in 2017, and the Springfield Braves in Wawanesa in 2019.

That changed this year.

“Since 2018, our team has kind of got a little bit better,” Enns said. “A few years ago we had a good run at the provincials as well but ended up losing and then COVID hit and things slowed down. Obviously it was always tough to beat Pilot Mound, and when you get to the league final you have to beat Morden, which is always a tough task. Every year we just got a little bit better and a little bit stronger and a little bit smarter with the baseball and luckily this year everything worked out.”

Enns made his first trip to the senior all-star provincials in 2019, but Border fell to Brandon in the semifinals. It was a different story this season as Border’s all-star team never lost a game, outscoring their opponents 44-5 in the round-robin and final en route to the championship on July 31.

“Our team was nothing less than stellar,” Enns said. “We kind of had it all. We had stud pitching and an extremely deep lineup and great defence. I don’t think there was really a hole in our lineup at all.”

A weekend later, Cartwright was in Rivers at the senior AA playdowns. It lost 5-4 to the host Comets in the opener on Friday, essentially putting it in win-or-else mode for the rest of the weekend. The next day, the Twins topped the Elmwood Giants and the Deloraine Royals by identical 8-4 scores to earn a berth in the playoffs. With pickup Anthony Friesen on the mound for both games on Sunday, they beat the Boissevain Centennials 2-0 in the semifinals and edged Rivers 1-0 for their first provincial crown.

“That was ridiculous,” Enns said with a laugh about Friesen, who threw 14 innings after virtually not pitching all summer with a sore arm. “Anytime he gets on the mound, he’s dominant. It’s hard to hit him because he knows exactly what he’s doing and exactly what he wants to do almost flawlessly every time. It was nice to win that, I’ll say that. Coming from a small town, I think a lot of people appreciated it.”

Amazingly, the winning was still far from done.

The Twins earned the Border pennant by going 9-5 — an identical record to the Winkler Whips — but they held the edge in the tie-breaking formula. Cartwright beat Clearwater 2-0 in the best-of-three divisional semifinals and Pilot Mound 2-1 in the divisional final, and then ran into Morden in the best-of-five Border final. The teams alternated winning games, with Cartwright taking Game 5 6-5 to earn the town’s first championship since 2002.

Three of the five games were decided by a single run.

“To win a league title was pretty awesome,” Enns said. “Playing again the same teams we always play against, it was nice to finally show them that we had the ability to do it. Every year we always put together a pretty good team and could just never seem to get it done but there is a lot of competition in the Border league. There are a lot of teams that are consistently really good and no teams are really a pushover ever. It’s tough.”

Enns has seen progress in his own game since he joined the Twins. Some of it can be chalked up to growing into his frame, but he has also developed as a player, hitting for more power and learning from his mistakes on the mound and trying not to repeat them.

It’s hard to overstate how big a part Enns played in his team’s success this summer. During the regular season, he hit .415, drove in 10 runs and scored 20 runs with an on-base percentage of .564 in 56 plate appearances, while going 3-1 on the mound with an earned run average of 1.67 and fanning 35 batters in 37 2/3 innings while walking just nine.

In 42 plate appearances in the playoffs, he hit three home runs, sported a .417 batting average and scored nine times. On the mound, he went 5-2, striking out 29 of the 182 batters he faced and posting an earned-run average of 2.78.

As a result, he was named Border regular season and playoff most valuable player.

“I was really happy with myself,” Enns said. “There’s only so much one person can do for a baseball team, and my stats, I thought I did well. I was hitting for power, hitting for average and RBIs and stuff like that but without everybody else in the lineup, I’m not going to win it myself. There were guys who had better stats than I did at the plate and there were guys who had better stats on the mound than I did, but luckily I did both so I think that’s why I was chosen.”

While it was a massive season for Enns, it was for the Twins as well, who finally capitalized on their enormous promise. Enns said winning the senior AA provincial crown finally put them over the top.

“There was a pretty big sigh of relief from the guys,” Enns said. “We had been so close and were an extremely competitive team — we love to win — and once it finally happened it was like ‘Wow, it feels pretty good.’

“It’s a long time coming.”

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