LIDOM: On Heels Of Streak, Santiago's Leones del Escogido Taking It One Game At A Time

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic - After a 1-4 start to the season, the Leones del Escogido sharpened their claws.

Over the next 10 games, the Leones went unbeaten, reeling off wins and climbing to the top of the LIDOM standings, turning a .200 winning percentage into a .714 winning percentage.

No, the season wasn't over at 1-4, but there were echoes of a season before, where the Leones struggled early and parted ways with manager Alex Cintron, elevating Ramon Santiago to the manager's chair.

As the old saying goes, you can't make the playoffs in the first month of the season, but you can certainly put yourself out of them.

"You can definitely see a lot of energy in the team, and a lot of enthusiasm from the players. You can see that before the game, they get fired up about the game that day," Santiago said before Wednesday's game against the Toros del Este. "And I think we got a lot more integration early. A lot of players with names like Santana, Joshua Baez, a lot of players that usually don't play that early [in the winter league season], they start playing really early this year. Not only for us, but for the other teams, too."

For Santiago's club, that early integration, both in their clubhouse and league-wide, is a sign of the team's potential. Their best has been beating the league's best early on.

During that 10-game winning streak, the longest thus far this year in winter ball, the Leones batted .291/.382/.418 and averaged 6.6 runs per game while allowing just 3.4. Twenty-nine of the 66 runs scored by the Leones during the streak came with two outs.

The 1-4 record in the first five games is "not the way that you want to start the season, obviously, but we knew that we had a talented team and it was just business as usual," said Leones reliever Kelly Austin, a New York Yankees prospect in his first season of winter ball. "And you start winning, you start kicking some butt, everyone's feeling good. You're coming home after games and you feel like you're 10 feet tall, right?"

But just because they've won 13 of their last 15 games and risen to the top of the league standings doesn't mean the work is over. Far from it.

But unlike Fleetwood Mac, they're not thinking about tomorrow. Nor are they thinking about yesterday.

"Our philosophy is that we've got to go 1-0 every day. Our philosophy is that whatever happened yesterday, happened yesterday," Santiago said. "We focus on the game today. We take one pitch at a time, one game at a time, and we try to keep it simple turn the page really quick. If we won yesterday, we're trying to win today."

The two-time defending champs have likely played their way into the round robin, barring an unfathomable collapse over the remaining 30 games of the season. Last season, they backed into the final playoff spot with a 23-27 record and then caught fire, going 12-6 to reach the finals, then defeating the Toros del Este 4-1 in the championship series.

Perhaps everything, all the success, on the mound, at the plate, in the field, is flowing from that philosophy that Santiago spoke of on Wednesday afternoon in Santo Domingo.

"It's like when you've got everything firing and you feel like you can trust the guys around you, it's a really hard feeling to beat," Austin said. "... It can change in an instant, right? And so it has to stay business as usual. We can't get on our high horse or anything like that, but just continuing to try to develop and get better. The older guys, they're trying to get contracts. The younger guys are trying to get opportunities. And so everyone's playing for something."

Everyone's playing for something, and everyone's buying in. If the Leones can keep taking it one day at a time, they could be the first back-to-back-to-back champions in LIDOM since the Aguilas Cibaenas did it in 1995-96, 1996-97, and 1997-98. It would also be the second time the Leones won three in a row, having done it in 1987-88, 1988-89, and 1989-90.

"We're here to win the championship. There are no shortcuts to winning the championship. I think the players know the message and they know what our mission is," Santiago said. We're trying to win the championship. You've got to trust the process. First, you've got to get to the round robin. And after the round robin, you got to go to the finals. So, we go one step at a time."