Lake Forest ends Lake Zurich's season

Reality hit Sam Zoibi before Lake Forest hit him. It hit Lake Zurich's senior pitcher before he exited the mound, down a run in the fifth inning.

As Zoibi approached the dugout, teammates, one by one, hugged him. The thought that he might have just thrown his last pitch as a high school ballplayer smacked him hard.

"I'd been thinking it from the first inning," Zoibi said of Thursday being potentially his last game as a Lake Zurich Bear.

The reality? Lake Forest was a tad too much for Lake Zurich again. For the third time this season, the Scouts edged the Bears, this time 4-2 in a Class 4A regional seminal at Lake Zurich.

"Everyone played their hearts out," Zoibi said after 11th-seeded Lake Zurich finished its season with a 15-20 record. "We gave it our best shot. I gave it my best shot. We hung with them. They hit the ball."

Each team had 6 hits, with Lake Forest senior right-hander Mark Turelli throwing a complete game. Coach Ray Del Fava chose to throw his ace instead of saving him in case the Scouts won.

"I can't say enough about the job Mark did - throwing strikes, getting ahead," Del Fava said. "He threw a lot of first-pitch strikes, and they were aggressive. He threw about only 70 pitches."

And Turelli was excited about getting the nod for his team's state tournament opener.

"I was ready to go," he said. "I love the ball in my hands."

"It was never even a (discussion) about who got this game," said Del Fava, whose Scouts beat the Bears 3-2 and 5-3 during North Suburban Lake Division action. "Because we know how good Lake Zurich is, there was no thought about holding Mark back to Saturday. We had to get to Saturday, and we knew Mark was the guy to get us there."

No. 6 Lake Forest (24-8) will play No. 3 Mundelein (26-8) in the regional final at 11 a.m. Saturday. Del Fava said lefty Luke Gibson will start, with Cal Coughlin ready to pitch in relief against the Mustangs, who swept the Scouts in two NSC Lake games.

Turelli (7-2) walked two, struck out one and got a 6-4-3 double play to end the Lake Zurich second. He allowed a 2-run double to Nick Sanders - who just missed a home run - in the third, but both runs were unearned.

"I've never really thrown very hard, so I've been all about location and mixing up different pitches," Turelli said. "The first time through the order we threw mostly fastballs and curveballs. But the second and third times through we started to mix up change-ups and cutters, pitches that they hadn't seen just to try to keep them off-balanced."

Zoibi allowed just 1 hit - a single by Coughlin that plated an unearned run in the third - through four innings. But Cal Kropke (2-for-3) led off the Lake Forest fifth with a double, and Jake Durburg followed with an RBI single to even the score at 2-2. Brad Czerniejewski made it three straight singles. After a popout and strikeout of the dangerous Coughlin, Zoibi issued back-to-back walks. George Karkazis' bases-loaded free pass forced in the go-ahead run and ended Zoibi's day.

"I kind of fell apart," Zoibi said. "There's really no explanation for it. I had it. It can be gone just like that - one inning."

Austin Wells and Steven Elrod also had doubles for Lake Zurich, which put at least one runner on base in every inning. In the Bears seventh, Jacob Kubin (1-for-3) walked and Wells (2-for-4) reached on an error with two, before Turelli got Sanders to groundout.

"We've lost so many one-run games," Lake Zurich coach Chuck Gandolfi said. "And it's the same way.

"We made plays, though. We executed. We held runners on. We did a few good things, but we didn't hit when we needed to hit."