Congratulations to Jordan Baltman, who will play his 300th senior match for the Echidnas on Saturday. Jordo will become officially just the second player in club history to reach 300 matches after the legendary Ken Nettle (over 500 matches), however, former President, Michael “Pickle” Paech (officially 272 matches) is likely to have played approximately 320 matches owing to playing in a number of seasons where the scorecards have been lost.
Jordan commenced in Under 13s for the Echidnas in 1996 before making his seniors debut in 2001. In his first full season in seniors, he actually showed more potential with the bat, scoring 101 runs @ 16.83, however it wasn’t long before he focused his efforts on bowling.
A medium pacer (if that!), whilst Jordo can generate useful outswing when conditions suit, he has relied frequently on cutters and slower balls with great success to lure many batters into false shots over the years.
His best individual seasons have come in 2007/08, when he threatened to emerge as an allrounder in C Grade with 219 runs (including his career highs of 45* & 47) and 22 wickets, and in 2009/10, when he took a career high 26 wickets @ 11.81 (including a career best 6/9 from 8 overs) in B Grade.
A 3 x Premiership Player, Jordan has captained the B Grade for 2 seasons & the Cs for 4 seasons. To date, Jordo’s 333 wickets are good for 8th most in club history. He has taken 20 or more wickets in a season on 8 occasions and has won a bowling trophy on a whopping 13 occasions, across A2s, Bs & Cs. His best work has come in C Grade where he has taken 207 wickets @ 16.85.
Likely to the surprise of many current players, Jordan has taken 86 catches (13th most in WCC history) & effected 19 run outs (the most in WCC history but benefiting heavily from the fact run outs were rarely attributed to individual fielders in scorebooks until the early 2000s).
When asked about his career highlights, Jordan referred to his 3 Premiership seasons and particularly to last season’s A2s, Cs & Under 16s triumphs. In terms of individual matches, funnily enough his favourite moments have come batting. The first was steering a very youthful C Grade side to victory at Langhorne Creek with 1 ball & 1 wicket to spare about 6 years ago, when he partnered with an 11 year old Connor Burgess for the last 14 runs, whilst the second was about 3 years ago, when he came to the crease at the Hill against Barker needing to make 4 runs with 2 balls left & got a juicy full toss first up which he swatted away to the boundary before celebrating by throwing his bat further than Ben Stokes did last week!
Off the field, Jordan has served on the Committee for at least the last 15 seasons, including at least 4 seasons as Vice President. In recent seasons he has taken the reigns of running our club social media pages & website. However, he is also well known as our statistical guru, managing both MyCricket and now PlayHQ for the Club whilst spending many hours tracking down and recording historical match and player results such that we now have almost complete records for A Grade dating back to the 1930s! For his efforts, Jordo received the prestigious Blight Perpetual Trophy as Clubperson of the Year in 2022/23.
Well done Jordo!
