Any team with good pitching has a chance to succeed, and Lakeland began that season with enough pitching to believe it could have another winning season. But with just two senior starters and youth all over the diamond, could the Hornets possibly expect to match last year’s run to the top seed in the Class A tournament?

Apparently.

Lakeland moved to 9-0 by way of a 9-3 win over Yorktown last night under the lights on its home field. The winner was sophomore lefty Joe Arena (right), who continued his transition into the role of ace with 5.2 innings of work.

Arena improved to 5-0. He kind of epitomizes the Hornets: young and unafraid.

“They’re just not fazed,” coach Dennis Robinson (above) told me last night.

Arena and fellow sophomore Jon Demarte have been a formidible tandem atop the rotation. Now, with Lakeland having already played nine of its 20 games, the schedule is spread out nicely, allowing those two to pitch most of the Hornets’ remaining games.

Senior catcher Jon Cosenza is the club’s leader. His poise and baseball IQ gives him great command over his teammates, and it is clearly evident. Last night Cosenza would greet every player as they came off the field after an inning, even the last guy who wandered in from right. That kind of leadership has caused the Robinsons to entrust their young team to Cosenza in some way.

He told me last night that the team never once thought it couldn’t duplicate last year’s near-perfect regular season. “One thing about playing for this program and for these two coaches we have, you expect to win,” Cosenza said.

Yorktown, as always, can hit, and it has a knack for competing, which is a testament to coach Sean Kennedy. In the last five years, I’ve never covered one of the ‘Huskers’ games and seen them roll over. They always fight, and they did it again last night, putting 10 baserunners on against Arena. (Only 12 LOB kept Yorktown from scoring more than three runs.) Last year they won quite a bit, too, finishing at 19-7, including a sweep of the season-series against Lakeland.

Right now, at 5-4, Yorktown finds itself in the midst of a stretch of six games in seven days. Last night was its fourth in four days, leaving the pitching staff paper-thin. The staff was a question mark this season even before the brutal stretch because it lost the likes of Dan Mason, who’s now at Cortland, and Eric Murphy and Pete Racioppo, who combined to pitch all but 23.2 of Yorktown’s 175 innings last season.

The ‘Huskers may have to patch together their pitching but don’t count them out. Somehow they always have more wins than losses in the end.

It’ll be interesting to watch both these clubs grow.