Rocks rally past Pioneers in regional baseball
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By Shannon Heaton | Wednesday, June 04, 2008 |
It’s very difficult to win baseball games when the heart of the batting order — Nos. 3, 4 and 5 — is a collective 1-for-10 at the plate, with six strikeouts.
That’s not always true, however, when the one hit might just as well have been nine for how valuable it was.
Thursday afternoon, the one came when Rock Island catcher Mike Wieland — who was 0-for-2 with a walk and two strikeouts going into his last at-bat — singled home teammates Andrew Ledford and Tyler Allison for the game-tying and go-ahead runs in the top of the seventh inning.
The base hit gave the Rocks a 3-2 lead, which held up as the final, over crosstown rival Alleman in a Class 3A Rock Island Regional semifinal game. Rocky (22-17) hosts Rock Falls in Saturday’s 11 a.m. championship game.
“I was excited, pumped up, ready to do it again,” Wieland said of the feeling he had, standing on first base having given his team the lead. “I was pretty worried about the other at-bats (earlier in the game), but I put it out of my mind and got the job done.
“Just everything fell into place, like we wanted it to.”
True enough, but having everything fall into place still depended on Rocks pitcher Jay Edmonson to close the door. That he did — like he had ever since the third inning, when he gave up the last of four hits he would surrender to the Pioneers (25-9).
“That’s one of the best things about it,” Edmonson said, knowing that he wouldn’t have to deal with being a hard-luck loser in what would have been his final high school start. “I was just hoping for our offense to step up, which (it) did.”
Before Rock Island’s offense stepped up, the Rocks defense brought Alleman down with several momentum-sapping gems. It started with freshman outfielder Nathan Gray’s diving catch of what would have been a two-run Danny O’Neill double in the first inning.
After turning double plays to close out both the second and third innings, Rock Island wasn’t done defensively. Brynn Bell followed that with two highlights in the fourth, diving deep into foul territory to catch a Mitch VanNatta popup, and then taking a home run away from the next batter, Jake Hemmen, with a catch that was made over the Rock Island High School right-field fence.
“I’ve been waiting to do that all year,” Bell said. “Our motto’s: ‘Do the little things right.’ We don’t just take BP (batting practice), some guys are hitting, and everyone else is doing something at the same time. So we just carry that on the field with us.
“To win games, you need to have defense and we had it tonight.”
It kept coming in the fifth, when Garrett Feldhahn stabbed a Evan Garrett line drive, and Patrick Briggs made a diving stop of a Charlie Mack groundball to close out the inning.
“We want to make routine plays, and if the situation arises when you make big plays ... our guys were very calm, focused, very business-like,” Rock Island coach Andy Campbell said. “Hopefully by the end of the year, you want that to get sunk in and they did that today.”
All of the defensive heroics might not have been enough against Alleman pitcher Justin Hauer, who struck out nine and allowed three hits through the first six innings before Rock Island found its offensive mojo against him and reliever Pace Bennett in the seventh.
“They didn’t just win the game in the seventh,” Alleman coach Chris Lemon said of the Rocks, citing all of the defensive wizardry. “They won the game. I don’t think we lost the game. I think their kids won it.”
Contact the sports desk at (563) 383-2285 or sports@qctimes.com.
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