Baseball: South Elgin's Gomez beats the best

Little draws the attention of a college recruiter to a high school baseball player quite like a peak playoff performance against top-level talent.

Take the show South Elgin junior pitcher Nate Gomez put on against highly regarded St. Charles North in a Class 4A sectional semifinal at Boomers Stadium last Wednesday, for instance, an outing that helped earn him the honorary captaincy of the 2017 Daily Herald Fox Valley All-Area Baseball Team.

The 17-year-old had already notched impressive regular-season wins against two of the area's best teams, including the very same North Stars, whose lineup featured a trio of future Divsion-I players batting 2-3-4. Gomez defeated them 3-2 in his third start of the season on April 8 with 6 innings of 4-hit ball in which he walked 3 and struck out 8.

That happened a week after the 6-foot, 165-pound right-hander limited host Huntley to an unearned run on 1 hit in 5 innings to win 5-3.

Neither was a run-of-the-mill victory considering how St. Charles North (30-5) and Huntley (31-7) fared in the aftermath. Each went on to win conference and regional titles.

Gomez continued to build momentum. Next came a record-breaking performance against West Aurora on April 26 when he set the 11th-year program's new single-game strikeout mark. He fanned 16 Blackhawks, surpassing the previous record of 15 set by 2014 graduate Ryan Nutof, who this spring completed his junior season at Michigan.

Gomez struck out 7 Bartlett batters in his next outing on May 3, a 3-0 win. He held the rival Hawks to 4 hits in 6 innings.

The son of Ed and Lisa Gomez scored another impressive win on May 13 against St. Charles East. The Saints came in hot, having won 13 of 15 and had recently been named the No. 2 seed in the Lake Park sectional ahead of No. 4 South Elgin. Gomez held them to 2 earned runs in 4 innings and exited with his team leading by 9 in an eventual 11-4 victory.

He didn't start again until May 31 in the highly anticipated rematch against the top-seeded North Stars, but all along he did damage at the plate. South Elgin's No. 2 hitter finished the season with a .422 average (38-for-90), 10 doubles, 3 home runs and 26 RBI.

However, it was the playoff game against the North Stars that piqued the interest of college programs like Western Michigan, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Valparaiso and Eastern Illinois, among others.

Relying on pitching mechanics honed by pitching coach Ben Erickson but first instilled in his South Elgin yard — “I credit my dad,” Nate said of Ed Gomez, a high school baseball player himself. “He taught me everything he knows and I put it to use.” — the senior dazzled on his biggest stage to date.

St. Charles North entered the game batting .361 and averaging 9 runs per game, but Gomez led the Storm to a 1-0 victory with 6⅓ scoreless innings. He allowed 6 hits, struck out 8 and walked a pair to improve to 6-0 and lower his ERA to 0.66 in 42⅔ innings.

“Playing in a big game like that against one of the top teams in the state and being able to come out with the victory is a real good feeling,” he said.

The St. Charles North victory turned out to be the final pitching performance of Gomez's season. Though he was scheduled to start Monday's supersectional against New Trier, he was scratched eight pitches into his bullpen session due to what Kating called “tightness.”

“I just wasn't feeling my stuff. I wasn't feeling it that day,” Gomez said two days after the 4-3 loss to New Trier. “I went out and threw my ‘pen and told coach I was good to go, but he didn't think so. It was a good decision by him. We just had to get the bats going and we came up short.”

Gomez says he's fine and expects to compete in upcoming showcase events. Meanwhile, a busy summer begins. He'll enter his third season as the school's quarterback this fall, thus he is expected to participate in 7-on-7 summer passing leagues while playing baseball for a yet-to-bedetermined club team.

Kating, also a South Elgin football underlevel coach, said he wants Gomez to continue playing multiple sports. However, the busy schedule means he has yet to approach his baseball ceiling.

“He's the type of good athlete who is very gifted, but I don't really know yet how good he can be and I don't think he knows how good he can be,” Kating said. “I would never tell a kid not to play multiple spots because I think you learn something from each sport that will make you better. But if you get him working out pitching-wise for two months before the (baseball) season starts and get him in shape to throw, who knows where he'd be right now.”