Rohe's amazing roll comes to unlucky end

With 13 wins on the season and 13 strikeouts in the game, Eric Rohe couldn't be faulted if he felt this were his lucky day.

He'd been on quite the roll -- or Rohe-ll -- after all.

So when Buffalo Grove third baseman Mike Ricciardi stabbed Dillon Smith's line drive that had "game-tying RBI single" written all over it, it was hard to believe that Mundelein's baseball season was over.

The 14th-seeded Bison not only had stunned the second seed 3-2 in eight innings of great high school baseball at Libertyville's picturesque ballpark Thursday but handed Rohe a loss.

The senior right-hander had entered the Class 4A sectional semifinal with a 13-0 record and 0.75 ERA.

"Their pitcher is a ton," said retiring coach John Wendell, whose Bison shocked another North Suburban Conference team, Lake Zurich, in the regional semifinals at Barrington last week.

"He's the best pitcher we've seen all year, there's no doubt in my mind," Wendell added of Rohe. "That kid's tough."

For the first 3 innings, Rohe looked like a pitcher who was even better than his spotless won-lost record suggested. He struck out the side in the first, fanned two more in the second and whiffed another pair in third.

When he got a called-third strike to open the BG fourth, that made it 8 strikeouts in 10 batters for "Cy" Rohe. The other two outs were weakly hit groundballs.

"At the beginning, I got all my pitches over the plate," Rohe said. "They couldn't figure me out the first time around, but the second time around I think they learned to sit on the curveball and changeup. They were hitting that -- fouling it off -- so I had to throw a fastball down the middle and they were just rocketing it."

Credit Rohe for being a great high school pitcher -- and being honest.

With one out in the fourth, BG finally hit the ball. Crushed it, actually.

Evan Kander ripped a double down the left-field line, lefty-swinging Zach Borenstein followed with a double the opposite way, Ricciardi singled, and James Hurley roped a double himself to make it 2-0.

Rohe then plunked Matt Stadler to load the bases, but got a 4-6-3 double play to end the inning.

All the while Mundelein wasn't doing much with unflappable BG starter Tom Moran.

But with their undefeated ace on the mound, the Mustangs, not surprisingly, found a way to fight back.

Colton Tortorello homered leading off the bottom of the sixth to cut Mundelein's deficit in half. With two out in the seventh, Kevin Barber's RBI double forced extra innings.

The Mustangs never lost faith, not even after Zack Adams slipped rounding third and had to hold on Barber's hit, not even after BG scored an unearned run in the eighth to go ahead.

Jamie Baldwin was leading off third with two out in the bottom of the eighth when Smith smashed a Moran pitch into the webbing of Ricciardi's glove, vaulting BG into Saturday morning's sectional final.

"There's been probably five games during the season that something like that got close to happening to us," Rohe said. "I had faith all the way then and all the way (at the end)."

Rohe threw a season-high 133 pitches -- 90 for strikes. While he struck out 13 thanks to a wicked curve and high-80s fastball, he walked only one.

"He had the best curveball I've ever seen and he located it real well, too, " said Hurley, whose bloop single in the eighth won it.

"He's been a workhorse all year," Mustangs coach Todd Parola said. "He had good stuff."

Rohe had a remarkable season. He fell one win shy of tying the school record, which Kyle Zaleski and Steve Plucinski share with 14. He had 108 strikeouts in 83 innings.

"I picked up a lot of velocity on my fastball this senior year and that helped out a lot.," Rohe said. "Last year my curveball wasn't as strong and I worked on that, and I can get that over the plate anytime now for a strike. Pretty much the curveball was the strikeout pitch that got me to where I was."

And belief in himself and his teammates.