Baseball: Stork hits, pitches Elgin past Larkin
Elgin senior Brandon Stork played perhaps the best game of his life on Tuesday on the city's biggest baseball stage.
The 6-foot-3, 195-pound right-hander tossed 6 innings of 2-hit baseball and he smacked a 2-run home run to help the Maroons snap a 3-game losing streak against crosstown rival Larkin with a 4-1 victory at cold and clammy Trout Park.
The opener of the 3-game Upstate Eight River series was scoreless until the bottom of the fourth inning when Stork stepped to the plate with Zach Edgar on first via an error.
Facing Larkin senior Seth Morford, Stork turned on a fastball running in on his hands and yanked it over the left-field fence to give the Maroons a 2-0 lead.
Lousy at best weather conditions - 40 degrees at first pitch with steady winds and a bone-chilling rain for the first five innings - seemed to have little effect on Stork (1-2), who went 1-for-2 at the plate with a walk.
"I was warming up in the bullpen and I saw the wind blowing out and I was kind of fearing it more than anything on the mound," he said. "Then it worked to my advantage at the plate."
"He's got some pop," Elgin coach David Foerster said after Stork's first varsity home run "His biggest thing is keeping his head on the ball and driving it and he did that."
Elgin (1-6, 1-0) went on to score twice more in the fourth inning to take a 4-0 lead on Larkin (2-3, 0-1). Sophomore Robert Bartlett, Jr. followed Stork's home run with a double to the left-field wall, and he came around to score when the Royals threw wildly to first base on a sacrifice bunt by sophomore Payton Reynolds.
Reynolds stole second, advanced to third on another Larkin error and scored on a squeeze bunt by Matt Turner.
"The home run was a nice swing, but we kicked a couple after that," Larkin coach Matt Esterino said. "(If) we hold to 2 there, we're going to have a good shot."
Though Stork's longball stole the spotlight, the 2 sacrifice bunts by Reynolds and Turner didn't go unnoticed by Elgin's coach.
"We have to make our breaks," Foerster said "Put the ball in play, make them field the ball, get some bunts down. That's how we're going to have to be, and it was big for us today."
Morford pitched well in a losing cause. The senior held the Maroons to 4 runs (3 earned) on 3 hits in 6 innings. He struck out 3 and walked 4.
Stork (1-2) was a tad sharper. Relying mostly on well-located fastballs, he threw 58 of 94 pitches for strikes, allowing 1 earned run on 2 hits in 6 innings. He struck out 6 and issued 5 walks.
"We were just taking bad cuts," said Larkin junior Mikey Rodriguez, who singled home Larkin's only run in the top of the fifth. "We just weren't putting the ball on the bat." Elgin's JC Fortmann earned his first save by striking out a pair in a scoreless seventh.
Weather permitting, the series resumes at Trout Park with Game 2 on Wednesday at 6 p.m.