Lack of sun leaves Moon to explain rare tie
Naperville North senior Devon Moon had to explain something to his baseball teammates during Monday's bus ride home.
Something about a tie.
"I play soccer in the fall so I'm used to ties, I guess," he said. "You don't really see it in baseball. But it's still great to start the season off."
Willowbrook scored twice in the bottom of the sixth inning to forge an 8-8 tie with the Huskies in both teams' season-opener in Villa Park.
After the third out of the inning, the game was called due to darkness.
The Warriors trailed 7-2 in the fourth inning but chipped away. They scored 4 runs in the bottom of the inning behind RBI singles from Dan Mahnke and Brian Cree. In the sixth inning, after Chris Savas singled home a run to pull Willowbrook within 8-7, the Warriors scored the tying run on a wild pitch.
"Battling back is the key, especially the first game," said Savas, who went 2-for-3 with 2 RBI. "It started slow but we came back and hit the ball."
Both teams have been taking advantage of the recent warm and dry weather to practice plenty outside. It showed at the plate, where they combined for 17 hits. It's completely unlike past seasons when openers were often a team's first time outdoors.
While both sides endured their share of wild plays - bad hops, balls lost in the sun, an abundance of bloop hits - it was still a good starting point.
"We've got some things to work on, but other than that I like the way we battled back," said Willowbrook coach Steve Gilliam. "It was a little bit of everything. We got a lot of guys in. We've got some young guys who got their first varsity experience. They battled, and it was good for us to see."
Moon went 3-for-4 with 3 RBI and finished a home run shy of the cycle. Alex Helms and Danny Sagan each had 2 hits and 2 RBI for the Huskies.
Naperville North ace Jake Naumann, one of three Huskies pitchers on Monday, pitched 3-plus innings while allowing 3 hits and an earned run. He struck out five and walked two. Nick Cuzzone pitched 3 innings for Willowbrook before Brian Monette finished the game.
Mahnke went 2-for-3 with 2 RBI for the Warriors.
"We made some errors today," said Huskies coach Carl Hunckler, whose team committed four of the game's six errors. "And we threw a lot of pitches. We used three different pitchers and we threw over 140 pitches in six innings. You're not going to win many games doing that."
BOX SCORE
Naperville North 8, Willowbrook 8
Naperville North 130 310 -8-10-4
Willowbrook 200 401 -8-7-2
2B: NN: Moon, Giannini.
3B: NN: Moon, Sagan; W: Savas.