By Andy Loigu

Picking up where he left off before the pandemic shut baseball down in March, Hackettstown’s King of Swing, Jake Hall, went 3-for-4 plus a walk in five trips, with his league leading fifth RBI, in a 14-12 Essex Cubs win over the DiMaggio Bombers on Tuesday in Linden. It was the Cubs’ fifth game of the season in the Atlantic Baseball Confederation Collegiate League and Hall’s .353 batting average is third in the league.

The Cubs play their home games at Rutgers-Newark.

Hall, who has been the right fielder everywhere he’s played because his strong and accurate arm keeps opponents from taking extra bases, is batting in his customary cleanup spot in the Cubs’ lineup.

His college season at Siena got off to an early start, with four games in sunny Orlando at Central Florida University, one of those big time teams you see on the ESPN channels.  Against the most polished pitchers he has yet seen in his young life, Hall had a double and an RBI.

He started to get attention from big league scouts when he broke the single-season home run record at County College of Morris, which stood for 34 years, with seven games left on the schedule. He also had 20 doubles that season, batting .381 while driving in 38 runs for CCM.

At Hackettstown High, playing for coach Gary Poyer’s always feisty Tigers, Hall had a season for the ages in 2016, earning All State Group 2 honors. His 10 home runs (a school record) were second in the state that year, the most in the northern part. His 37 RBIs (fifth in the state) came during a 21-game season in which the Tigers went 13-8. He batted .455 (30-for-66) and had an awesome 1.500 on base plus slugging number that impressed stat head analytics geeks everywhere. Those analytics guys are the ones who convince the big league GMs who to draft.

He wore number 8 for the orange and black clad Hackettstown Tigers as a high school player, always reminding this old-school columnist of Cal Ripken. Hall’s bat was thunderous and his fielding smooth as a spring breeze. In addition to being named to the All-Northwest Jersey Athletic Conference first team, his greatest honor was being named to the first team by the Express-Times, which covers counties on each side of the Delaware River; Northampton, Lehigh, Hunterdon and Warren, including some really big schools like Phillipsburg, Easton, Hunterdon Central and Allentown Central Catholic.

He is appropriately named for his likely induction in the near future into the Hackettstown Sports HALL of Fame. This columnist is an incurable punster.

Good luck, Jake, and stay well and safe.

Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.