Zamora Leading Sharks With His Bat And Glove As a Freshman
Baseball is in Joseph Zamora’s blood.
His dad played professional ball in Nicaragua and his brother Freddy Zamora was selected in the second round of the 2020 Major League Baseball draft by the Milwaukee Brewers.
Now Joseph, a freshman infielder on the Miami Dade College baseball team, is making his bid to join the professional ranks.
The slender, five-foot-eight inch tall second baseman, who can also play shortstop, is having a breakout season for the Sharks.
Zamora, 19, is leading the team with a .345 batting average and 51 hits and is second on the squad with 26 RBI. He also has a .432 slugging percentage, two home runs and seven doubles.
“He’s just a smart baseball player,” said Sharks head baseball coach Adrian Morales. “He plays the game the right way, plays hard everyday and really wants to win.”
Zamora, who was born in Nicaragua and moved to the United States when he was one, got his first taste of organized baseball at Tamiami Park playing for the Blue Dogs for five years. The team even played in a tournament in Cooperstown in New York when he was 12.
In high school, Zamora played varsity baseball for four years at Miami Southridge Senior High School. He played sparingly as a freshman and sophomore but his career took off after his junior campaign when he moved from first base to shortstop and boasted a .292 batting average.
But by his senior year, the coronavirus pandemic made the recruiting process difficult. He was lightly recruited and considered walking on at Florida SouthWestern State College in Fort Myers before MDC swooped in with an offer late last summer.
“It felt great because at the time I was stressing about which college I was going to go to,” said Zamora who lives 15 minutes from Kendall Campus. “When they hit me up, I got excited because I knew I was going to play college [ball].”
His teammates say he has been a great fit. He has not committed an error at second base this season and his ability to switch hit makes him a key cog in the lineup.
Zamora has also come up big in key moments. Nothing illustrates that more than his pinch-hit walk-off home run on March 3 that gave the Sharks a 4-3 win versus Lincoln Land Community College in a tournament in New Port Richey.
“That was really a special moment,” said catcher Victor Davila.
Since that victor the Sharks have turned their season around, winning 10 of their next 11 games. They are 26-12-1 and 9-0 in Southern Conference play.
“He’s just a kid that understands his role on the team and is out here every day trying to get better,” Morales said. “He wants to win and makes all his teammates better.”
