If there were concerns that the quality of baseball in Gastonia, North Carolina was going to suffer after last season’s team in the city was forced to fold, the new kids on the block have put those concerns to bed.

It’s because Gastonia Baseball Club, the newest team in the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, is also arguably the league’s best team halfway through the 2024 season.

Gastonia has begun its inaugural season in the ALPB on fire, capturing the first-half South Division championship (and the all-important clinched playoff spot with it) well before the final day of the first half approached during the week of the Fourth of July. With players who have produced all over the diamond and a proficiency for stringing together wins, Gastonia has firmly established that it’s not here to simply take part in the ALPB, but to take it over.

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There’s still half of a season (plus playoffs) left to play, but Gastonia won’t have to deal with many of the late-season pressures other clubs in the South Division will face over the coming weeks. But if you’re expecting Gastonia to slow down now, think again.

Here’s a look back at Gastonia’s first half of its first ALPB season and how it secured a playoff spot so fast:

Great Out of the Gates

Despite sharing the same city and a ballpark, there is no relation between Gastonia Baseball Club and the Gastonia Honey Hunters of last season, with the latter ballclub’s ALPB membership terminated in the offseason after racking up unpaid debts to the league. 

But in terms of building up a winner — like the Honey Hunters did when they made the ALPB Championship Series in their final season of play — the new Gastonia club has hit the ground running and gotten to work right away on pushing to bring an ALPB title to the city. 

Ex-Honey Hunters coach Mauro Gozzo and general manager Brady Salisbury were hired by Gastonia Baseball Club upon the Honey Hunters’ folding, giving the new Gastonia club much of the same front office core they had during their successful 2023 campaign. And through one half of the 2024 ALPB season, things couldn’t be going better for Gastonia as it clinched a playoff berth with a first-half South Division crown and holds on the Fourth of July the best record in the league at 44-17 overall, dominating its competition throughout the final few weeks of the first half of the schedule (more on that later in this article) to roll to the title with an eight-game lead to spare over the High Point Rockers. 

The Gastonia lineup is among the most potent in the league as it holds through 61 games the third-highest team batting average in the ALPB (.270), while the pitching staff has been about as strong with a 4.08 ERA to rank second in the ALPB at the first-half mark to give the team plenty of depth and production in its arsenal for the second-half slate. 

Capturing the first-half trophy also importantly means that Gastonia won’t have to deal with any late drama for a playoff spot in a couple of months, too, a huge advantage when the postseason looms late in the year and every team is trying to play its best level of baseball.

A Joyful June

If Gastonia ends up winning the ALPB title in a few months’ time, it will be able to point to the month of June as the reason why it got into the playoffs in the first place and where it found its identity as an elite ballclub. 

Already in a good position record-wise as it was 22-11 entering June, Gastonia turned on the jets ahead of the Fourth of July by going a fantastic 20-6 in June, a run which included both an eight-game winning streak and a seven-game winning streak as the ALPB rookies ballooned their lead and subsequently cruised to the South’s first-half title. A 15-2 mark from June 4-22 was the high point of Gastonia’s hot month, seeing it sweep multiple teams in that stretch.

Additionally thanks to that surge, two of Gastonia’s star players utilized the club’s stellar month to help them secure deals with other professional organizations as a result.

Shortstop Jack Reinheimer, one of the stars of the Honey Hunters for the past two seasons (including breaking the ALPB’s single-season stolen base record with 55 swipes in 2022) before moving to Gastonia’s new team, saw his contract purchased by the Chicago Cubs organization late in June as the former major-leaguer with the Arizona Diamondbacks and New York Mets was assigned to Triple-A Iowa right off of the bat. 

Meanwhile, right-handed relief pitcher Bryan Blanton also found a new home Wednesday with the Saraperos de Saltillo of the Mexican League after a 3-2 mark with a 2.96 ERA and 28 strikeouts in 24⅓ innings pitched with Gastonia this season, joining ex-Honey Hunter's pitchers Zach Mort and Alex Sanabia on the squad.

Power at the Plate

One thing has been for certain when Gastonia’s bats have come up to the plate this season — they bring the juice. The club led the ALPB at the season’s halfway point with 107 home runs (being the first club in the league to reach the 100-homer mark in the process) and a .492 team slugging percentage to its name, along with a .857 team OPS that ranked second in the league. 

Gastonia has nine games this season as of Friday in which it’s tallied at least 10 runs (going 8-1 in those games, too) and had four players at the halfway mark who had reached the 10-homer threshold in Justin Wylie, Jake Gatewood, Josh Stowers, and Patrick Mazeika; by comparison, no other team in the ALPB had more than three of its players hit at least 10 homers at the halfway point. 

Gatewood and Stowers in particular each have 52 RBIs as of Friday, ranking them tied for third among all ALPB players in the RBI leaderboard, and Gastonia as a whole continued to crush the baseball in its second-half opener (a 7-6 win Thursday) against the High Point Rockers. Stowers went 4 for 5 with two runs in that game, Kevin Watson Jr. and Hidekel Gonzalez each went yard and Marc Flores hit a go-ahead double in the top of the ninth inning to help give Gastonia its seventh straight win, signaling to the rest of the ALPB that it has no plans to let off of the gas for the second half even with a playoff spot clinched. 

Gastonia has earned a reputation as a feared lineup, and as it now gets to sharpen its game even more without the pressure of chasing postseason play, it could give the club a dangerous edge come postseason time.

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