Baseball: Hampshire grinds out win over Crystal Lake Central
Scoring runs has been hard for Hampshire’s baseball team this week.
Three hard losses to open Fox Valley Conference games would have been, well, hard for the Whip-Purs.
So they did something about it. Hampshire used small ball to earn a big win, rallying to beat host Crystal Lake Central 2-1 on Friday.
The Whips scored the tying run in the sixth inning on a wild pitch and pushed across the winning run in the seventh on another wild pitch. Tyler Lacke, who got the win in relief of sophomore starter Gavin Weston, stranded the tying run at third base in the bottom of the seventh, as Hampshire rebounded from two losses to Jacobs (4-2 and 13-1) earlier in the week.
“It felt great just to come out and play,” said Hampshire junior third baseman Logan Nawrocki, who smoked a double to deep center field in his first at-bat and started the seventh-inning rally with his second walk of the game. “We had a rough two losses [earlier in the week], and we bounced back. My approach was just to hit the ball hard. That’s all I was thinking.”
Central (3-7, 1-2), which split with Huntley to open FVC play, couldn’t take advantage of a good outing by starting pitcher Johnny Geisser, who took a 1-0 lead into the sixth. The senior right-hander held Hampshire (7-3-1, 1-2) to only one hit – Nawrocki’s one-out double in the second – until Cole Harkin bounced a two-out single into left field with two out in the sixth.
Harkin stole second base and advanced to third on an errant pickoff throw. Then after Geisser brushed Weston with a pitch to put runners on the corners, Geisser spiked a 3-1 pitch to Shane Pfeiffer that bounced over the head of catcher Maxwell Geske. Harkin sped home with the tying run.
“I was trying to pitch around their [No.] 3 hitter [Pfeiffer] a little bit to get to their fourth hitter,” Geisser said. “That’s what I was planning on doing.”
Making only his second start of the season and first since March 23 against Mt. Vernon in downstate Marion, Geisser got his sixth strikeout to end the sixth. The McHenry County College commit induced eight ground-ball outs.
“The fastball felt good, my changeup felt good,” Geisser said. “I was landing my slider for strikes a lot, and it was creating a lot of swings and misses and a lot of weak contact.”
Lacke retired the Tigers in order, striking out two, in the bottom of the sixth. Then in the Hampshire seventh, Geisser issued a leadoff walk to Nawrocki. Pinch runner Ryan Draftz eventually scored on a wild pitch by reliever Niklas Thorsen after an errant throw on a sacrifice bunt by sophomore Tyler Rubino put Whips on second and third with none out.
“My coach was just like, ‘Get it down. Make sure it’s a strike,’ ” Rubino said. “I just wanted to make sure that I got it down and then hustle out of the box and see what happens. They made a mistake, and we executed on it.”
Hampshire had only two hits.
“In the cold, you got to play small ball, especially against a tough team like this,” Whips coach Frank Simoncelli said. “They got a history of being grinders and playing with grit and being scrappy, so we had to do our part to make that [win] happen.”
A one-out error put the tying run on second base in the Tigers’ half of the seventh, but Lacke got a fly ball and groundout to leave Carter Kropke at third base.
“He was throwing strikes and attacking,” Simoncelli said of Lacke. “That’s really what we needed. We just needed a little momentum, and we took it away from them a little bit.”
Geisser took the loss, despite allowing only one earned run.
“Johnny did a great job today,” Tigers coach Cal Aldridge said. “He did his job. We just didn’t help him enough offensively.”
Central’s only three hits came in the first inning on consecutive singles by Nick Kohlhase, Owen Kelley and Ethan Wolf (RBI). Weston struck out three in his five innings.
“They pitched us well,” Aldridge said of the Whips. “They played solid defense behind their guy, they had timely hitting, and they executed their bunting game. We weren’t prepared to field it today.”