Libertyville's bats ablaze in opening win

In the wake of another scoring binge, it seemed appropriate that the Libertyville Legion baseball team was pigging out on pizza.

From his hotel room in Freeport, Ill., Tuesday night, Libertyville coach Jim Schurr ordered plenty of pizza to go around for his hungry players, who again put up big numbers on the scoreboard.

"We're finally sitting down to our dinner at 9:30 at night," Schurr said as he paid the pizza delivery guy. "It's been a long day."

It's no wonder.

Libertyville strung together hit after hit after hit -- 18 to be exact -- en route to an 18-10 victory over host Freeport in the first round of the 2nd Division Legion championship that features teams from the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th districts.

Today's second-round opponent for Libertyville (5 p.m., Freeport High School) is St. Charles, the 11th district representative.

Libertyville, which moves to 15-7-1, won the 10th district title last weekend by defeating Lake Forest in the championship game. If Libertyville emerges from the five-team, double elimination 2nd Division tournament, it will advance to next week's state Legion tournament in Mattoon.

The last time Libertyville advanced downstate was in 2001.

"I'm pleased with how we're playing right now," said Schurr, who coaches the high school team at Libertyville and took on the Legion team last year. "Today (against Freeport) we played really good defense. The field was really hard and dry so there were a lot of infield grounders. But if we got a glove on it, we made the play.

"And obviously, when your team scores 18 runs, you've got to be happy with that. We had some timely hits, too. We've really been hitting the ball well."

And often.

Libertyville's 18-run outburst comes just days after the team scored 24 runs in a single game in the 10th district tournament. Over four games in that tournament, Libertyville scored a total of 45 runs.

Overall, the team is averaging about 12 runs and more than 10 hits per game.

"We have a lot of good hitters on this team," said Schurr, whose team never trailed Freeport and rolled up 9 runs in the seventh inning to put the game out of reach for good. "There haven't been too many games that we haven't been able to hit the ball."

Against Freeport, John Brennan (3-for-5), Brian Whartnaby (3-5), Tim Matheson (2-3), Tom Jacobson (2-3), Joey Bowens (2-4), Joey Aiello (2-4) and Chase Guarnaccio (2-4) all had multiple hits.

Whartnaby, the winning pitcher, also had 2 doubles and Matheson had a home run.

In the 10th District tournament last week, Libertyville was just as impressive.

In its 24-11 win over Lake Forest in the opener, seven players rolled up multiple hits, three hit home runs and Whartnaby hit for the cycle.

"We had Joey Bowens do that for us during the high school season in the spring," Schurr said. "I had never had a kid hit for the cycle in 18 years of coaching. So to have two kids do it within the same (calendar year), that's pretty neat."

Schurr is also impressed that his team has been so productive given its youth.

Normally, most Legion teams have at least a handful of college players on its roster. Libertyville has only two and former Carmel standout Sean McCreary (Illinois Wesleyan) has been out with an arm injury since the second week of the season.

And former Libertyville star catcher Matt Dittman, now at Illinois, has been available only occasionally since he is splitting his time with another summer league team.

"We are such a young team," Schurr said. "It's pretty rare for Legion. But even though we're young, we've got good pitching and our pitchers have been getting really good run support and good defense behind them.

"I bet since (tournament action started), we've gotten at least one double play in every game, which is really good at this level."