Hunter Mercado-Hood named HarbourCats first-half MVP

Hunter Mercado-Hood
photo by Brian Hayes

The scribes at the Victoria HarbourCats Baseball Blog have named Hunter Mercado-Hood  (“HMH”) as the team’s MVP for the first half of the 2014 season. HMH was the only HarbourCat named on all four ballots cast by the bloggers and he earned two of the four first-place votes.

Mercado-Hood is currently second in the West Coast League with 29 runs batted in -- an amazing total considering that the HarbourCats have played 28 games and he has only appeared in 25 of those games. He is also 10th in the league in hitting with a .347 batting average. Aside from runs batted in, Mercado-Hood also leads the team in at-bats, runs, hits, and doubles. His defense has also been steady, as he has only committed one error while registering a pair of outfield assists.

Sean Watkins finished second in the voting after his surprising first half. We were expecting Watkins to be used as a pitcher this summer, but the recent graduate of Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California has put on a show with his potent bat. All the youngster has done so far is notch the sixth-best batting average in the league (.358) while compiling a stellar 1.80 ERA in five innings of relief. Watkin’s high point had to come on June 30th when he almost single-handedly defeated the Kitsap BlueJackets with an eye-popping performance. With the HarbourCats bullpen in disarray, let’s hope that Watkins sees more action out of the pen in the second half.

The full voting results are as follows (number of first-place votes in parentheses):

1. Hunter Mercado-Hood (2) - 9 points
2. Sean Watkins - 4 points
3. Mikey Wright (1) - 3 points
3. Alex DeGoti (1) - 3 points
5. Gabe Clark - 2 points
5. Griffin Andreychuk - 2 points
7. Alex Rogers - 1 point

Honourable mentions: Sean Watkins and Alex Rogers.