Hot Dog Baseball Senior Spotlight: If you’ve come to a Hot Dog varsity baseball game the last couple of years, you might have walked up and thought that Lucas Waggoner was having a bad game. When Lucas has a bad hitting day or a rough outing on the mound, you can see it all over his face…or so it would appear. When Waggoner goes 3-4 at the plate(which he’s done a lot of this year), or throws 5 dominant innings, he still looks like he just lost his best friend. I used to make the mistake of trying to change that, but baseball is all about consistency and Lucas is nothing if not consistent. Every game, every inning, every out, and even every pitch in baseball is physically independent of the last. If you can mentally and emotionally approach it that way the game becomes easy. That’s Lucas Waggoner’s best attribute as a baseball player. He’s never too up and never too down(despite the aforementioned facial expressions). But don’t confuse any of this with lack of caring and/or intensity, Wags is a competitor. During the first couple of weeks of the ‘25 season, we were still trying to put together a pitching depth chart. We had a pretty good idea of who we would rely on to be our conference starters, but there were a number of guys that we needed to figure out the best way to use them on the mound. On a cold, drizzling Friday night we had a game against Kokomo at Municipal Stadium. We told Waggoner that he would throw 1 or 2 innings of relief at the most. We got a quality 5-inning start out of our starter and were sitting at a 2-2 tie. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to see what Lucas could give us for a couple of innings….8 scoreless innings later, Wags was still on the mound in a 2-2 game battling and giving us a chance to win. Even though we lost a 13-inning heartbreaker that night, we learned everything we needed to know about Lucas. At the plate, Lucas is an enigma. Every game he has a handful of the worst swings you’ll ever see in a varsity game. But by the end of the night, he’s 2-4 with a double. Guys like Lucas are the most frustrating for pitchers because you never have them beat if they’re in the box. You have him in an 0-2 count, he was late on the fastball and missed the curveball by 6 inches…but then fouls off 3 great pitches, works the count to even, and rips a line drive for a base hit. I love him as one of our players, but I would have hated him as an opposing pitcher.. Lucas Waggoner has had an impact on the Hot Dog Baseball program that a lot of people wouldn’t understand. He’s certainly had some great moments on the field, but his ability to compete on every pitch, to never give in, regardless of the count or the score, has been his biggest contribution to Frankfort baseball.