While manager John Hayes of Post 346 would always rather have the last at-bats as home team, he admitted Friday that his players and coaches sometimes think otherwise. And when the host team of the Terre Haute Regional lost the pre-game flip and thus had to bat first against Lafayette Post 11, Hayes’ players showed him why.
Before Lafayette pitcher Taylor Glaze had recorded an out, he’d already thrown 35 pitches and allowed four runs. By the time the top of the first inning was over, the score was 5-0 and Glaze’s pitch count had reached 51. With the sun beating down and temperatures nearing triple-figure status — and with A.J. Reed on the mound for Post 346 — that was more than enough.
“It was hot,” Reed said after striking out 14 batters in eight innings of the host team’s 8-0 win. “Fifty-one pitches in an inning? [Glaze] wasn’t going to go very long … but we jump on whoever [the opponents] put in there.”
“We lost the flip, but we scored five right away and set the tempo,” added third baseman Michael Eberle. “On a hot day like this, everybody was dragging a little bit. To get up early was nice.”
“Our kids like to bat first,” John Hayes noted after the game, “and that worked out pretty good this game. A.J. was on top of his game, and when we score runs like that, it makes it easier to pitch.”
Glaze, the winning pitcher in each of the last two Class A high school state championship games for Lafayette Central Catholic, nibbled early and paid dearly.
Jacob Hayes opened the game by driving a full-count pitch over the fence. Tyler Wampler also worked his way to a full count, fouled off a pitch, then drew a walk. Wampler took second on a passed ball, and when Reed got a bloop single on a 2-and-2 pitch the Lafayette center fielder tried to throw out Wampler at third. The ball went in the Wayne Newton dugout, scoring Wampler and sending Reed to second. Eberle then came back from an 0-and-2 count with a host of foul balls and finally, after getting to a full count himself, drove a double to the right-center gap to score Reed.
So far that was four batters, three runs and 28 pitches. Glaze needed just two pitches to deal with Parker Fulkerson, but the first of them was a wild pitch that sent Eberle to third, and he scored from there as Fulkerson reached on an error. After two out — and another wild pitch — Fulkerson hustled home from second when Seth Lunsford got an infield hit on a chopper to the right side that left no one available to cover first base.
At that point, Reed said, he could appreciate the heat.
“It helps keep my arm loose, so I don’t have to worry after long innings,” the big lefthander said after the game. “[That first inning] gave us some momentum, but I had to come out and still throw strikes.”
Reed actually did walk a batter and allowed an infield hit in the bottom of the first, but got out of that inning with a strikeout and Eberle’s stellar play for the third out on a slow roller. Those were the first two of 10 batters retired in a row, seven on strikes, and only in the bottom of the sixth — when the first two Lafayette batters singled before Reed dominated the middle of the Post 11 batting order — was he threatened again.
Post 346 tallied single runs in the second on a towering homer by Reed, in the third on two Lafayette errors, and in the top of the seventh when Eberle again showed his two-strike prowess, fouling off three pitches in a row before lining his team-high 13th homer.
“It was a two-strike count, I got a pitch down the middle and I took advantage of it,” he said after the game. “I’ve been seeing the ball pretty good.”
Both Eberle and Jacob Hayes finished the game a triple shy of the cycle, in fact, and Reed failed to get two more RBI in the top of the sixth when his two-out screaming liner was caught — almost in self-defense — to end the inning with runners at second and third.
John Hayes said he was aware of Glaze’s potential, but added, “Our kids handled him. We moved the ball pretty well on him.”
As far as the effect of the early lead, the manager added, “I know how tough it is. It’s hot out there, unbearable for the kids. But we didn’t want to be in that 3:30 [losers’ bracket] game.”
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