You name it, nothing goes right for Batavia

Batavia senior Brian Krolikowski has a message for future generations of Bulldogs.

"Guys need to know next year they have big shoes to fill and if they want to live up to it and break more records, they can't just show up. They have to work at it. It's the small things that count and what you do when no one is watching."

Krolikowski knows what he's talking about as one of the seniors who made his final season at Batavia one that will go down in the school's record books.

He said those words with red eyes following Batavia's 10-1 season-ending stunner of a loss to Cary-Grove Monday in the Class 4A Rockford supersectional.

Stunning not so much they lost but the way they did it, playing nothing like they had all year while setting a school-record with 30 wins and coming into Monday's game on a 29-3 tear. Every phase of their game - on the mound, in the field, on the bases and especially at the plate - struggled.

"We haven't had a game like that in a long while," Batavia coach Matt Holm said. "Not much went right today."

Unfortunately for the Bulldogs, their final game of 2009 looked nothing like most of the 36 before that.

The 1 run and 6 hits they managed against Cary-Grove starter Matt Nelsen were a far cry from the 8.3 runs and 9.8 hits they had been averaging in their 4-0 playoff run.

"We really couldn't figure out the pitcher," leadoff hitter Tim Schofield said. "We couldn't get the bat on the ball. We weren't on our game today."

Nelsen didn't have the fastball to match the Wheaton North power pitchers Batavia beat Saturday, but as Holm said, Nelsen "shows you don't have to throw 1,000 miles an hour to be effective."

Nelsen said he knew nothing about Batavia coming into the game other than a small tip from his coaches.

"Some of our coaches said their 3-4-5 hitters are pretty decent hitters so I just wanted to keep them off balance," he said.

He did just that, holding Tim Drish, Krolikowski and Jordan Coffey to an 0-for-7 day until Coffey's leadoff double in the seventh.

"He just kept mixing us up," Krolikowski said. "That was probably the No. 1 guy we didn't want to see after Saturday. Seeing (Wheaton North's) Jake DeAno and Trey Martin who were both touching 89, 90, we hit them well. When you get a guy come out here only throwing 78 with a 60 mile-an-hour curveball that's going to throw off your whole timing. You come into the playoffs this late you expect to see guys throw 90 and you get a guy like him that does a good job mixing it up and hitting his spots it's tough to bounce back and face that."

Nelsen did what Batavia starter Adam Karger was hoping to, improve his record to 11-0. Instead, Karger ends at 10-1 after falling behind 5-0 in 4 innings of work while coming back on 3 days rest after throwing 120 pitches to beat Wheaton Warrenville South last Thursday.

"I figured he'd run out of gas earlier but I didn't expect it would be that quick," Holm said. "Jordan came in, but he still hasn't had the time on the mound.

"Then we compounded it by trying to do too much," Holm said of a pair of errors on Cary-Grove sacrifice bunts.

Holm and his coaches decided Sunday to go with Karger and use Coffey in relief. As it turns out they both allowed 5 runs.

"Karger said his arm was good, why go away from something good?" Coffey said of the meeting. "We were rolling through the playoffs with him and Krolo. If he says he is good, we'll go with it. I thought it was money in the bank with him. He's a stud. He's been money in the bank all season. It's just too bad we got behind early and the fourth inning is the one that took the wind out of our sails and we weren't able to regroup."

Things didn't go much better in the field - 3 errors leading to 4 unearned runs - or on the base paths with runners thrown out at third in the second and home in the fifth.

All that turned the scoreboard into a one-sided outcome. It certainly didn't seem like seniors who brought so much to Batavia - the school record for wins, becoming only the second Batavia team to make the Elite Eight, the dominating 20-1 record in the Western Sun, the long postseason run after the past two years of first-round exits - should be walking off the high school field for the final time on the wrong side of a 10-1 score.

"I don't know if the score makes it worse," Krolikowski said. "A loss is a loss. Whatever the score was it's on the wrong side of the column. I think all of us are just overwhelmed with the loss."

While eight seniors played their final game for Batavia Monday, it's not the last time you'll see them on the baseball field. Krolikowski (Miami of Ohio), Coffey (Taylor University), Welter (Benedictine), Drish (Joliet Junior College), Joe Aguilar (Waubonsee) and Karger (Augustana or Lewis) are all going to play college baseball. Henry DuQue is trying to do the same, while Tyler Lindquist will be a student at Illinois State.

"The season was incredible," Holm said. "They became selfless and once they did things became quite a bit different for the Bulldogs."

"It was a heck of a season," Coffey said. "A lot to be proud of, nothing to hang our heads about. Most of the guys have another season coming or bigger things than high school baseball to look forward to."

"There are some good leaders there and they had a good season," Schofield said. "Hopefully they can play in college and keep things going because they are really good."

No doubt, next year's Batavia team will look quite a bit different from this one with only junior Schofield returning from the starting lineup. But they'll also have Jesse Coffey who played shortstop plus a sophomore team that only lost 1 game.

And while Krolikowski wants all those Bulldogs to work as hard as his group did and to achieve as much as they have this year, he's also going to sit back and enjoy what his senior year became.

"Today is going to be emotional for us, but when everything settles in you realize, holy cow, you just went 30-7, best school record ever," Krolikowski said. "That's going to sink in and you are going to smile."

jlemon@dailyherald.com