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Metea Valley delivers in the clutch

If there's one area of improvement targeted by Metea Valley's baseball team, it's delivering at the plate in clutch situations.

The Mustangs definitely came through on Thursday.

Scoring 6 runs with two outs, Metea Valley beat Glenbard East 10-5 in the deciding matchup of their three-game Upstate Eight Valley series in Lombard.

The Mustangs (8-3, 3-3) by no means played a perfect game, but big hits helped keep their distance from resilient Glenbard East (4-9, 1-5). Seniors Andy See, Jacob Petersen and Matt Fitzgerald each came up with 2-run hits in different innings to never allow the Rams creep closer than 2 runs away.

"Our seniors stepped up this time," said See, who went 3-for-4. "I feel like for the first part of the year we haven't stepped up that much and we really got some clutch hits today."

See's 2-run double came during a 4-run second inning that also featured RBI hits by Jack Feeley and Devon Wardell. Glenbard East scored on an error in the bottom of the inning, but the Rams were forced to play catchup the entire game.

Petersen's 2-run double extended the lead to 6-1 in the third inning, and Glenbard East answered with Dominic Coveny's 2-run double. Metea Valley opened it up with a 4-run sixth inning highlighted by Fitzgerald's 2-run single and Jack Szott's run-scoring single.

Joey Moore's sacrifice fly narrowed the gap to 10-5 in the bottom of the sixth, but with runners on first and third and two outs, reliever Ben Belskis needed just two pitches to get a groundout and end the threat.

"We've just got to play better baseball," said Glenbard East coach Joel Pelland. "The team that plays the best is the team that wins, and we didn't play better than them today. We can compete with anybody. I firmly believe that. But we've just been too inconsistent."

The game saw seven pitchers take the mound, four for the Rams. Mike Sfikas picked up the win in relief of Petersen, while Tyler Huber took the loss.

"Today we were able to add on, and we haven't always been able to do that," said Mustangs coach Craig Tomczak. "I think our approach was better today. We're still a little inconsistent, but we got a couple of big hits today, which was nice to see."

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