Ellington making noise for Frogs

Matt DeWalt

Chris Ellington and his bat have been making headlines for Texas Christian University and the Horned Frogs baseball program in recent weeks and he gives all the credit to hard work.

“I think it takes a lot of hard work and dedication,” Ellington said of the road he traveled to TCU. “I think if you want something bad enough and you work hard enough to get it, eventually, you’ll get to where you want to be.”

On back-to-back days Ellington helped the Horned Frogs notch a 3-2 victory over the Baylor Bears with a two-out, eighth inning, RBI-double that proved to be the game winner and the following night he caught fire in San Marcos and lifted TCU to a 12-8 win over the Texas State Bobcats with a 4-for-5 night that included two home runs, a double and six RBIs.

“I didn’t start off swinging the bat too hot this year, but I’m glad that my coaches showed faith in me and kept sticking me in the lineup,” Ellington said of his current hot streak. “We’ve been working with my approach and it has paid off the past few games, so hopefully, I mean, two games don’t make a season, I’m just going to keep sticking with this approach and hopefully, it will keep paying off for me.”

Ellington is currently hitting .333 with 10 runs, 17 hits, 7 doubles, a triple, three home runs and 14 RBIs.

A former Weatherford High School Kangaroo, Ellington has moved up through the ranks of baseball from little league to high school to junior college and finally TCU. The fact that he has been able to stay close to home has allowed his family and friends to closely follow his career and attend many games.

“I think that’s big time,” he said. “My family support does a lot for me and I’m just really fortunate that I am getting to play pretty close to where my parents do get to see me play a lot, and last year in junior college as well.”

Because of his experience at all levels of the sport, Ellington said the game of baseball doesn’t change much from one level to the next, but added that attending a junior college before moving onto a major university helped him learn more about the game and understand it more completely through valuable on-field experience.

“Baseball is baseball,” he said. “I learned so much from Dusti Hart at Grayson [Community College], he taught me a lot about baseball and before that, Coach Tadlock before he left. I think that helped. They definitely taught me a lot about baseball. Just playing every day there and playing a lot of games, you learn a lot.”

Ellington has two younger brothers, Jordan and Landon who are also making their way through the respective levels of the baseball world. While some may consider Chris to be a role model for his younger siblings he said he doesn’t put that kind of pressure on himself and he doesn’t want them to feel like they have to follow in his footsteps.

“I don’t want to make my brothers try to stand up to what I do at all,” he said. “I mean, my brothers... Jordan, he’s a real hard worker. I don’t want them to feel any pressure to have to live up to what I’ve done. I just want them to have fun playing baseball and not take it too seriously, just have fun with it.”

Despite his personal success on the field and at the plate in recent weeks, Chris is only concerned about the big picture — helping his team win games. He added that mentality is shared by the entire TCU team.

“Our mentality was with the Baylor game, we were going to start a new season,” Ellington said. “After we left Las Vegas, we had a tough conference game against Las Vegas, now, we have started our season over. Basically, that’s been our mentality, just start our season over. We’ve been playing really well as a team lately, everything is clicking together. We’re starting to hit better, our pitching has been keeping us alive all year and we’re actually able, now, to help out our pitching a little bit. I’m really happy about the way the team is playing right now, it’s really good.”

Currently, after three games against Air Force last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the Horned Frogs rest at 19-12 overall and 5-4 in the Mountain West Conference, but there are a lot of games left to play before anything is decided.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not we’re going to make it [to postseason play],” Ellington said of the team’s future. “TCU is a winning program and we expect to win, that’s every single person on this team. The player build up is every player expects to win and accepts responsibility that we’re going to win. We don’t really look ahead, we take each game one game at a time and we’re just trying to win each game pitch by pitch and all the postseason stuff and all the wins will take care of itself.”

TCU plays Baylor in Waco at 6:30 p.m. tonight.