The Bellwater Ironclads open their season at Founders Park this week under a new manager and with a retooled bullpen, hoping to avoid a repeat of last year's late-season collapse that cost them a playoff spot on the final weekend.
New manager Ray Delacroix inherits a roster that finished last season 84-68, tied for the division’s second-best record, before losing five of its final six games to miss the playoffs on a tiebreaker. Delacroix, promoted from the organization’s Double-A affiliate after six years managing in the system, said he has spent the offseason focused less on wholesale changes than on shoring up a bullpen that allowed 31 runs over that final six-game stretch.
“You don’t blow up a team that won 84 games,” Delacroix said during a workout at Founders Park this week. “You figure out why it stopped getting outs in September, and you fix that specific problem.”
A retooled bullpen
The Ironclads added two relief pitchers over the winter, including right-hander Desmond Cade, who posted a 2.31 ERA at a rival Triple-A affiliate last season, and re-signed closer Julio Vasquez to a multi-year deal after he tested the market. General Manager Sandra Tolliver said retaining Vasquez was the front office’s top offseason priority. “We were not going to let last September be the reason our closer left,” Tolliver said. “He wanted to be part of fixing it, and that told us everything we needed to know about bringing him back.”
The lineup returns largely intact, led by third baseman Miguel Ontiveros, who hit .312 with 19 home runs last season before a wrist injury ended his year in late August. Ontiveros said he has been cleared for full contact since early in spring workouts and expects no restrictions for the home opener. “I feel like I have something to finish,” Ontiveros said. “We were rolling before I got hurt, and I want to be on the field for whatever happens down the stretch this time.”
Every team in this league has arms. What separates the teams that make the playoffs from the teams that collapse in September is whether the bullpen believes in itself when it matters. We spent all winter working on that belief as much as the mechanics.
Ray Delacroix, Manager, Bellwater Ironclads
A ballpark riding the city’s momentum
Tolliver said season-ticket renewals are up 11 percent over last year, a figure she attributed partly to the team’s late-season near-miss and partly to Founders Park’s proximity to Foundry Row’s growing biotech offices, which she said has brought a wave of after-work group outings from local employers. “We used to sell mostly to families on weekends,” Tolliver said. “Now we’re selling Tuesday-night group blocks to companies that didn’t exist in this neighborhood five years ago.”
Tolliver also said the team is monitoring the city council’s newly approved bus rapid transit corridor, which is expected to run within a few blocks of Founders Park once construction wraps in about two years, as a potential boost to attendance among fans who currently drive in from West Bellwater. “Parking has been our single biggest complaint on customer surveys for a decade,” she said. “If this corridor delivers what the city says it will, that complaint mostly goes away.”
Delacroix, who managed against several of this year’s opening-week opponents during his years in the league’s Double-A ranks, said he expects an unusually competitive division this season, with at least four teams he considers legitimate playoff contenders. “Nobody’s rebuilding this year,” he said. “Every team we play in the first two weeks is trying to win now, which is exactly the kind of season that tends to come down to bullpen depth in September.”
What to watch this week
The Ironclads open a three-game home series this week before a nine-game road trip, a scheduling quirk Delacroix said he has used to plan an aggressive early rotation featuring the team’s top three starters in the home opener series rather than saving them for the road trip. Right-hander Theo Aldrich, who logged a career-high 162 innings last season, is set to start the opener.
Ontiveros said the clubhouse has talked openly about last September rather than avoiding the subject, a departure from how the team handled the loss in the immediate aftermath. “For a while nobody wanted to bring it up,” he said. “Now it’s basically why we show up early. Everybody remembers exactly how it felt to watch that lead disappear.”
Delacroix said he does not plan to set public win-total expectations for the season, saying only that the organization’s goal is to be playing meaningful baseball in September rather than watching a tiebreaker decide the outcome again. “Last year we were good enough to make the playoffs and didn’t,” he said. “This year the standard is simple: don’t let that happen twice.”
The home opener also marks the first game since the Bellwater Frost wrapped their AHL season last month with a second-round playoff exit at Anchor Arena, meaning Founders Park now becomes the primary draw among the city’s three minor league franchises until Bellwater River FC’s soccer season begins at Millrace Stadium later in the year. Tolliver said the front office has coordinated with both organizations on a joint season-ticket discount aimed at fans who follow more than one team, a promotion she said performed well in its first year last season.
Cade, the newly signed reliever, said he chose Bellwater over two other offers partly because of Delacroix’s pitch about the bullpen’s role in the September collapse rather than any individual player’s performance. “He didn’t tell me I was going to fix everything by myself,” Cade said. “He told me the group needed to trust each other in the seventh and eighth innings, and that was a more honest conversation than I’ve had with some other teams recruiting me.”
Founders Park’s grounds crew has also made changes over the winter, reworking the infield drainage system after a string of rain delays last May forced the postponement of four home games in a ten-day stretch. Tolliver said the upgrade was funded partly through the team’s own capital budget and partly through a small city facilities grant tied to the ballpark’s status as a downtown economic anchor.