South Elgin bounces back against Lake Park
South Elgin baseball coach Jim Kating wants his pitchers to throw a first pitch strike.
He knew Lake Park pitcher Christian Taugner threw a first-pitch strike 76 percent of the time when he 1-hit Kating’s Storm team on Wednesday.
In response, South Elgin starter David Palmer threw a first-pitch strike on 15 of Lake Park’s 31 batters Thursday. He also allowed just 1 run and 6 hits in his 6-1 complete-game win in Upstate Eight Valley action at South Elgin.
The Storm scored all 6 of their runs in the first two innings.
“I threw strikes and they were hitting it,” said Palmer (6-2), who struck out 3 batters. “They weren’t swinging at the first pitch. Coach stresses (throwing a first pitch strike). I was mixing it up the best I can. I was throwing a lot of stuff at them.”
Palmer was solid through the first 5 innings, retiring the first 7 batters he faced. It wasn’t until the sixth when Lake Park (14-10, 10-6) started making a comeback. Catcher Tom Spear was hit by a pitch and Anthony Gallina followed up with a single. After catching John Schram on a called-third strike, Palmer hit third baseman Ryan Castello to juice the bases with one out.
Nico Chaidez crushed a sacrifice fly to center to score Spear cutting the lead to 6-1.
South Elgin (15-4, 12-3) again loaded the bases in the seventh, this time with a 2-out single from Nick Turner, followed up by Spear again getting hit by a pitch and Gallina singling.
In need of a desperate out, Schram hit the ball to Strom second baseman Michael Murphy, who flipped it to Nevan Jeske at second to end the game.
“We played pretty well for five innings,” Kating said. “They gave themselves opportunities. We had opportunities. We took advantage of some mistakes. We scored five runs after there were two outs in the second.”
Lake Park allowed 5 unearned runs in the game, all in the second inning.
Alex Wolfe, David Goins and Ryan Ford drew successive 2-out walks to load the bases. Then a series of errors opened the floodgates for 3 runs to score. Palmer and Andrew Weedman each had RBI singles giving South Elgin a 6-0 cushion by the end of the inning. Mark Pall (1-3) took the loss, with Erik Benhart finishing out the final 4 innings allowing just 1 hit.
“In that inning there were two outs and no one on and we had their 8 and 9 hitters up,” Lake Park coach Dan Colucci said. “The game gave us three opportunities to make one play and we could have gotten out of there with no runs. If we made one out of those three plays, it’s an entirely different ballgame.”