The Duluth Tropics, the American Legion baseball team, has put on a clinic all season, en route to winning the sub-state tournament championship as the one seed.

Typically, seasons are waves of ups and downs, but not for the Tropics.

As for what’s been working for them, second baseman Jay Nick says, “I think a lot of it’s been our hitting. You know, we’ve got a lot of talent on the team, but especially in the beginning of the season, we weren’t able to put a lot of hits together in streaks and score a ton of runs, and I think in the sub-state we were definitely able to do that better than the rest of the season.”

One of the coolest facts about the Tropics is they are Duluth’s only team, with players from three Duluth high schools – Duluth Denfeld, Duluth East, and Duluth Marshall, coming together and putting their school seasons aside for a great summer.

“In the end we’re all just guys who want to play baseball and it’s easy to just be competitive in the regular season, but once we get to playing together, it’s a lot of fun,” said Bjorn Lind, a shortstop.

“We’re just a bunch of dogs pretty much.,” said Caleb Kilroy. “We wake up and every day we just seek excellence in this team, and all these guys just work their tail off and we do whatever it takes to win games and we figure it out.”

Game one of the state tournament is Thursday.