Baseball: Joliet West eventually gets on track to best Lockport

LOCKPORT – The Joliet West offense was extremely quiet for the first few innings of a nonconference matchup with Lockport on Saturday.

That’s out of character for the Tigers, who routinely get offensive production from all parts of their lineup.

Still, just one hit, an RBI single from Parker Schwarting in the third inning, was all the typically potent Joliet West offense mustered through the first three innings.

The Tigers didn’t seem too concerned, though, trusting that the offense would eventually find its bearings. That faith was rewarded when Owen Young swatted a three-run homer in the fourth inning to send a charge through the offense which would finish that inning with four runs and then tack on five more in the sixth inning to help them secure a 10-6 victory.

The confidence that the team would eventually break through was fully present with Joliet West (23-4).

“That’s preached every day in practice and training,” Young said. “We trained really hard in the offseason and its showing that we all have the confidence and ability to compete every pitch and every at bat. We have the right guys to do the job.”

Although that could have been questioned early on, eventually Joliet West got at least one hit from all but one of the slots in its lineup including two-hit performances from Schwarting, Peyton Barborek, Dan Lukancic and Young, who would lead off the five-run fifth with a triple.

“There’s definitely room from improvement, but once we get everyone going one through nine and the pitchers competing,” Young said, “we’re a pretty tough team to beat.”

Lockport (12-9-1) appeared up to the task to stay in the game early on, scratching out an early 2-0 lead after coaxing a pair of walks to start the second inning. A Joey DalPonte groundout pushed the first run across and Bryce Flood connected for the first of his two RBI hits on the day to push the Porters forward.

Joliet West got one of those runs in the back in the third on the Schwarting RBI single, but despite creating a lot of traffic on the basepaths largely due to walks, the Tigers struggled to come up with the big hit early on.

But Barborek and Lukancic provided back-to-back one-out singles in the fourth to set the stage for Young’s long ball – and then the line kept moving via free passes which allowed Schwarting to deliver an RBI single for the second consecutive inning to push the Joliet West lead to 4-2.

West would pour on five more runs in its half of the sixth to fully seize control of the contest, but Lockport tried to chip away but pushing across two runs in the sixth courtesy of a two-out, two-run single from Flood. In the seventh, Lockport pdushe across two more runs courtesy largely of two errors from Joliet West’s usually leak-proof defense. And while Tigers coach John Karczewski was happy his team was able to claim a win, his team’s inability to retain its defensive focus for the entire game sparked his ire.

“I’m not happy with how it ended, we gotta do better,” Karczewski said. “You can’t have four errors on plays that should have been made. We’ve got seniors and they’ve got to want the ball.

“I expect more. We make routine plays and then sometimes we try to make plays look a little too flashy than just making the play.”

But despite the lapses, Karczewski likes where his team is overall.

“22 wins this early in the year, that’s great,” Karczewski said. “But we need to continue to be not be complacent and keep getting better. Because you have to be playing your best baseball at the end of the year.”