Baseball: Lincoln-Way East takes advantage of its opportunities

FRANKFORT — In a game briefly halted by an unorthodox flash snowfall, it only seemed fitting that Lincoln-Way East would find a way to beat Minooka on Saturday in a bit of an unorthodox way.

The Griffins captured a 14-4 victory over the Indians in a nonconference matchup of two of the area’s better teams, but both teams featured pitching staffs that were a bit taxed in the game.

As such a potentially potent Lincoln-Way East (15-5) offense sort of had the bats taken out of their hands earning their way on via frequent walks and hit batsmen and judiciously spreading hits around at just the right time.

The Griffins also used the bunt to their advantage, frequently moving runners and executing a successful suicide squeeze as it closed in on the mercy rule.

“We’ve actually struggled a little bit with those situations this season,” Lincoln-Way East coach Eric Brauer said. “It was actually an emphasis at out practice yesterday to be a little better in those situations.”

Both teams’ pitching staffs struggled to keep the ball in the strike zone. Eleven batters reached on both sides via either walks or hit batsmen, Lincoln-Way East just did a much better job of capitalizing on its scoring chances.

The Griffins plated two runs in the second without the benefit of a hit, pushed across three more runs in the fourth largely on the back of a two-run homer from John Connors and then invoked the mercy rule by having seven of the first eight batters reach with just two hits and then finishing the game on a sacrifice fly from Zach Kwasny, who reached base in his four other trips to the plate.

“We’ve definitely started the year with a little bit of a rough stretch as a whole lineup, now we’ve got guys bunting and we’ve got guys like John Connors hitting the long ball and other guys putting together some hits,” Kwasny said. “We put up a couple of crooked numbers and that’s how you win ball games.”

The contest was just another in what has emerged as a long stretch of games against high-quality opponents for the Griffins and while in the long run that will likely benefit the Grifffins, sometimes the day-to-day operations can be a little bit dicey.

“We’re in an incredible difficult part of our schedule here, feels like everytime we show up we’re playing a ranked team,” Brauer said. “Somebody with a good pitcher on the mound and a good team and I think on that front we might be a little fatigued, lot of games this week with a lot of good teams and a lot of weather stuff to get through. We’ll get rested up tomorrow and get ready for West [Lincoln-Way West] on Monday.

“It was not pretty today. Winning is way better than losing, and we’ll take the win, but we’ll need to play better moving forward.”

Minooka (13-4-1) didn’t push across a run until the fourth and had just one hit through those four innings until Lincoln-Way East starter Connor Jendraszak ran out of gas and allowed a series of free passes. A fifth-inning solo home run from Nate George closed the Indians to within 6-2, but Lincoln-Way East quickly extended the lead to 8-2 in its half of the inning.

The Indians appeared to be on the verge of making a game of it in the top half of the sixth by plating two runs to close the gap to 8-4 and loading the bases, but the big hit wouldn’t come. Then in the bottom half, a spent Minooka pitching staff that had survived an 11-inning marathon with Oswego the afternoon wilted, issuing four walks, had a batter reach via catcher’s interference and hit another bat to lead to Griffins stacking up the runs to invoke the mercy rule.