CLARKSTON WINS DISTRICT OPENER
Momentum is a fickle thing.
One minute, it can be in your back pocket, and the next, you’re searching all over the ground to see where you dropped it.
For the first two innings of Tuesday’s Division 1 predistrict baseball game at Oxford, the momentum was squarely in the back pockets of the Waterford Kettering Captains, while not much went right for the Clarkston Wolves.
Then a switch flipped.
The Wolves sent 11 batters to the plate in the third inning, scoring seven times to completely turn momentum on its ear, then held on to the advantage the rest of the way for a 9-4 win.
“Baseball is a game of failure. You’re not gonna get it done 100 percent of the time but you can kind of tell we panicked a little bit after they hit the home run, and had the two-run inning, but all in all, we came back we have really good at-bats for the most of the day and we did a good job,” Clarkston coach Addison Turk said, after reminding his team that it’s not always going to go right, but it’s more how you respond.
“When you got a guy like Trevor (Busyn) on the mound, you just want to get out to the lead and then just ride him through. And finally I think it was the third inning, we broke through and you know, you kind of exhale a little bit as a coach, but not all the way. It’s never easy. It’s never easy.”
The Wolves (17-11) advance to Saturday’s district semifinals, where they’ll take on the host Oxford Wildcats (21-10-1) in the first game at 10 a.m. Lake Orion (269) will take on Waterford Mott in the second semifinal at 12:30 p.m.
Kettering finishes the season 22-10, falling short of repeating as district champions, but the Captains had every belief that they could compete for this one, after sticking in the Lakes Valley Conference race and starting this game as well as they did.
“We fought all season. And there’s not a day where I haven’t believed in this team. There’s not a day that I haven’t believed in this lineup. We have we have come back at least a half-dozen times from three, four, five runs down to to come back and battle. These guys are a family they believe in each other, they pull for each other. It’s it’s been an amazing, amazing group of kids,” Kettering coach Frank Vigliarolo said. “We started off five years ago, we had seven wins. We’re five years later,
we’re 22 wins. You know, we’ve got talent, we’ve got some of the best talent around and I will blow this horn as much as I as much as I can. Because that’s how great these kids are.”
Wayne State-bound Logan Van Sicklen got the Captains on the board first, with a solo homer to lead off the second inning. Christopher Bowman followed with a double, and came around to score on a throwing error.
The Captains offense would go quiet for a while, though, as the Wolves grabbed the momentum.
After having the first inning end with a line-shot comebacker, and the second with a runner gunned
out at the plate by Kettering center fielder Zarek Zelinski, the barrels the Wolves were getting on the ball finally paid dividends in the third. Lucas McKinney led off with a triple, then Luke Spicer followed with a wind-blown RBI double that just eluded Zelinski’s grasp. Ben Bacon singled in the tying run, then Mason King’s RBI single put the Wolves on top for good.
Logan Brimacombe beat out a two-out infield single to plate another run, then Carson White tripled him in, and scored on an RBI single by McKinney.
“I think it was the first inning we had three hard-hit balls. All three outs. That’s the way it’s gonna go. Camden Paul hit the ball hard all four times didn’t have a hit today,” Turk said. “You know, and credit to our outfielders, though. Defensively,
you saw the wind. Ridiculous. … And they ran down some baseballs today. Both both teams did. But I’ll tell you I’m really proud of those three guys.”
The Wolves padded the lead to 9-2 with an RBI triple by Preston Stout and an RBI single by King in the fourth.
Kettering got one run back in the fifth on Zelinski’s RBI single, but Stout tracked down a deep fly to center by Van Sicklen to end the threat, the final out of the day for Busyn.
Spicer took over on the mound, and worked his way around a pair of doubles, although it got a bit dicey in the seventh, when Tommy Knibbs III doubled in a run to cut the deficit to 9-4, bringing the heart of Kettering’s order to the plate. Spicer got a pop out and a strikeout to end it.