The team showed a lot of resilience coming back from two early losses against the Grizzlies from Illinois and the MP Express also from The Land of Lincoln to get a win against Hilltop PA. The first loss was a 10-6 decision that saw strong pitching from Drew Dinnhaupt and Ben Gorski and a solid 2-hit game from Tim Fell but errors on defense haunted the team early and we never got the bats going enough to fully recover. The Coaches knew the second matchup was a tough one as the MP Express were second in the tournament and had scored a lot of runs (like 30) in their first 3 games. Also, we were starting to get deep in our pitching rotation. Pickles Maguire and Bowie Hoban did a fantastic job getting in some innings. We lost 9-0 and had some nice defensive plays especially from Ben Gorski in Centerfield who made a great stab at the fence for an out. Our final game of the night started at 8:30pm and we knew we were light on pitching but also knew this was a team we could beat. The challenge for the Coaches was to keep the kids focused and stay away from the errors. We came away with a 7-1 victory on the back of Matt Connolly, who retired 12 batters on just 40 pitches in 4 innings of work. CP25 (Colin Pierce) called a great game behind the plate. The Hammer, Elijah Schwinghammer went 2-2 and Ben Gorski went 2-3 with a back-breaking 3 run double in the bottom of the fifth inning. The team came through with an errorless game with infielders Mikey Jesse, Nick Vivona, Drew Dinnhaupt, Gorski and Brian Cook making every play that came their way and Tim Fell, Pickles Maguire and Zach Hoban shagging balls like cans of corn in the outfield.
