Bourne Braves hitter Derek Bender focuses on performance heading into playoffs
BOURNE – It’s the Fourth of July, and Derek Bender and his Cape League teammates are marching in the parade.
Bender has a little American flag in his hand and declares he’s going to trade for a bigger flag and run it down Main Street.
The rest of the Bourne Braves are skeptical.
“You won’t do that,” they tell him.
“Watch me,” he says.
Having traded for the bigger flag, he spots a house with an even more majestic Old Glory out front. He asks if he can borrow it. Be sure to bring it back, they tell him. He hands over his hat as collateral.
So he’s walking with the big flag, leading the parade. “You actually did it,” his buddies tell him. “But you still have to run it down Main Street.”
The parade ends, people start heading for their cars, and there’s Bender dashing back down the street the opposite way, flag flying.
“That’s my favorite memory so far,” he said.
That is saying a lot.
There is little about his Cape League experience that Bourne slugger Bender, whose team will play Cotuit in the first round of the playoffs starting Friday, is likely to forget.
Regardless of how it all turns out, the West Division All-Star MVP and one of the league’s top hitters throughout the regular season, will head home to Murrells Inlet, S.C., and back to Coastal Carolina University with a summer of memories that will go with him everywhere, forever.
Bender wrapped up the regular season Wednesday night
Bender wrapped up the regular season Wednesday night with a .374 batting average that fell just short of the .375 recorded by Falmouth’s Travis Bazzana, a rising junior at Oregon State whose one hit in a 7-3 victory over Cotuit was enough for him to clinch the Cape League batting title as Bender went 0-for-3 in an 8-3 win over Hyannis.
Asked how he felt about not winning the title, Bender said, “It would have been nice, but we won the game tonight and that’s all that really matters. We’re in the playoffs, we’re moving in the right direction, and I’m so happy and so excited to get ready. Friday can’t come soon enough.”
Bender’s success this season, in which he consistently has been one of the league’s top hitters – often at the very top – and was the leader in stolen bases with 18, has been about having fun. It’s also about winning, and the two go hand-in-hand.
He plays better when he's having fun
When he’s tight and nervous, Bender says, he doesn’t play well. He plays better when he’s having fun. “Most of all I’m just trying to win,” he said. “Winning is fun. So you might as well just have fun in anything that you do.”
Facing Bender is not always fun for a pitcher. “He can hit everything,” Hyannis pitcher Tony Robie, a rising senior at Texas State, said Wednesday night. “And then he’ll battle you when you get ahead in the count and force you to come right at him. If he gets his pitch, he’s going to do some damage with it. He’s a quality ballplayer.”
Added Bourne field manager Scott Landers: “He’s tough to strike out, he takes his walks, he can hit both the fastball and the off-speed pitch. He’s a really big threat. He can go both sides of the field with consistency, so it’s a tough out.”
A quiet little town just south of Myrtle Beach
Formerly from Albany, Bender and his mother and father live in Murrells Inlet, S.C., a quiet little town just south of Myrtle Beach.
Bender has seen plenty of nasty weather here and there, including hurricanes of course. “I’ve actually been in more tornadoes in my lifetime than hurricanes, up in New York,” he said.
He recalls one that struck about a decade ago, when the family was having a cookout.
“It was one of the hottest days of the summer,” he said. “We were sitting out there and we could see clouds just rolling in, darker than anything. The sun just goes out. My mom’s sitting there with her umbrella, cooking the steaks on the grill. Next thing you know, things start swirling.”
The tornado uprooted a willow tree in their yard and sent it crashing through the roof of the house. The family had taken shelter face down in the basement, and no one was hurt.
He recalls the creepy stillness that preceded the full force of the storm. “You feel this power that just gets sucked from the air,” he said. “It’s incredible.”
At age 6, a ball hit him in the face
That wasn’t Bender’s first life-threatening experience. Playing catcher in a ballgame at age 6, he threw his mask off for a better view after a player darted in front of him on a play at the plate and the ball hit Bender in the face, severing an artery. He underwent immediate surgery and was in and out of the hospital for about a month.
As soon as he could, he went back out and started playing baseball again. It never occurred to him to stop.
His host family on the Cape is his actual family. His mother, Diane, and father, Dennis, rented a house in Bourne for the summer. “I lucked out in that sense,” he said. “They’ve always been very supportive of me. I really couldn’t do anything without them.”
He attended The Albany Academy for middle school and three years of high school, and then spent his senior year at St. James High School after the family moved to South Carolina.
He’s an only child. Loves all kinds of music. He played the baritone but had to give it up to focus on baseball.
“I think I’ll have a little studio in my house later in life where I can revisit that part because I’m so passionate about music, especially classical stuff that I can play,” Bender said.
'Sparkplug of energy'
“I’m kind of an introvert, which is weird for people to hear because they see me as this sparkplug of energy. When I’m around people my social batteries charge. I love talking and being someone that people can gravitate toward. But I like my alone time.”
He’s also become right at home in crunch time. At Coastal Carolina, the rising junior batted .250 through 22 games his freshman year, and in 62 games this past season hit .341 with 19 home runs and a single-season team record of 83 RBIs.
“My freshman year I didn’t do as well as a I wanted to,” he said. “The game sped up on me really fast. I was really nervous a bunch of times. A lot of times when I was up at bat it seemed like I was trying to get from the box back to the dugout as quick as I could.”
He first concentrated on slowing down and finding a comfort zone. “Then I took it a step further and it was like, now that I’m in the box longer, how can I dominate while I’m here?”
Self-awareness came into play
He credits trust in himself and his coaching staff for the turnaround. Self-awareness came into play as Bender focused on maintaining his strengths and working to improve upon his weaknesses.
He tried to make practice harder than the game itself so that when the lights came on, he would be ready for anything.
The result: “When it mattered most, when guys were in scoring position, I did my job,” said Bender, who batted fourth for his college team.
He was the designated hitter more often than not at Coastal Carolina, but proved versatile in the field, having started in left and right field, at first base and behind the plate, and played errorless defense through his two college seasons.
“I’m looking to catch more this season, because that’s where I think I can help the team the most,” he said.
On the Cape, Bender kept his focus on performance
This summer on the Cape, Bender has kept his focus on his performance and not on the numbers. “I find more often than not that when I stray from trying to win games and trying to just be out here and be in the present, my mind goes elsewhere as a player,” he said.
At Coastal Carolina this past season, he found that as he closed in on the RBI record, it became a distraction. “That was hard to miss, hard to not focus on,” he said. “I was stuck at 80 for like two weeks. And I couldn’t do it. I remember I struck out looking with a runner on third base. That’s how bad it got. I don’t strike out looking very often.”
Bender decided to forget about the record. The team made it to the NCAA regional finals in Conway, S.C., where it lost to Duke, finishing the season at 42-21 overall.
“At the end of the day, I can get the record. But if we lose this regional, I’m still going to be upset. Which I was. I got the record but we lost in the regional final for the second straight year.”
The same goes for playing in the Cape League now. “I could win the batting title, or I could not,” Bender said after a game at Doran Park last week. “If we don’t go home with a championship at the end of the summer, I didn’t succeed in my goal of winning.”
Looking further ahead, Bender says he won’t get to choose when his career is over. “The game will tell me, let me know when that time comes,” he said. “I’m not going to leave any stone unturned, and I’m going to do everything in my power to be the best player I can be, help my team win the most games and play for as long as I can.”
Bill Porter is a former sports editor of the Cape Cod Times.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Bourne Braves slugger Derek Bender is tough to strike out
