Souderton withstands H-T for spot in title game
H-T will play either Quakertown or Perkiomen Monday night
Put Souderton and Hatfield-Towamencin on the same baseball field and chances are, a compelling game is going to come of it.
Saturday night, under the lights at Quakertown’s Memorial Park, the top two teams in the Bux-Mont Legion went at it for a spot in Monday’s championship. For six innings, the game mirrored the teams’ race in the regular season standings, with Souderton jumping out to a huge lead and the Titans gaining a lot of ground back.
Then, Dan Knechel delivered a key hit and Nolan Bolton slammed the door as Souderton topped Hatfield-Towamencin
10-8 to put itself one win away from the Region 2 tournament.
“It got a little rough toward the middle of the game, but this is a tough group of guys and we’re going to stick around,” Knechel said. “We really just tried to get everybody calm, we all seemed down about blowing that lead but it happens, but either way we still had the lead so we just had to re-focus.”
By value of its regular season title, Hatfield-Towamencin has secured a spot in regionals, but the two-time defending tournament champion Titans want to keep that title as well. Post 933 couldn’t have started the game much more off script in the game’s first three-anda-half innings though, committing four errors on defense as Souderton jumped out to a 9-0 lead.
The errors made life tough enough for starting pitcher Zack Thomas, then the Post 234 bats got rolling. Souderton took a 2-0 lead after two, then Blaise Sclafani had a two-run single in the third inning as part of a three-run frame. Post 234, which finished the regular season with the same record as Hat-
field-Towamecin but lost the title on tiebreakers, then seemingly broke the game open in the fourth.
“We kicked it around a little bit, then they started hitting and nine runs, I couldn’t imagine us being down nine runs in this game,” H-T manager Joe Drelick said. “Hat’s off to them, they really started hitting and were taking it to us.”
Bolton and Knechel had RBI singles, Moses Clemens an RBI double and Luke Shank an RBI triple as Souderton posted four runs on four hits in the top of the fourth stanza to make it 9-0. Colin Hoy came in for H-T and got the last out, then the Titans gathered in front of their dugout before taking their at-bats in the home half of the frame.
“The thing we talked about was keeping it loose,” Drelick said. “We could have panicked and said ‘they’re killing us,’ but instead we said keep it loose, swing the bats and play the game. If I was screaming and yelling at them, then we’d all be yelling at each other and got even more off the tracks.”
This is where things started to veer off-path for Souderton. Sclafani, who had started with three strong innings on the mound, started to lose his feel of the strike zone and walked four men in the fourth. Coupled with a fielder’s choice error, a wild pitch and an RBI single by Jake Drelick, HatfieldTowamencin ended up with four runs.
An inning later, the Titans scored the same number of runs in nearly identical manner. Sclafani and reliever David Gulibon combined for three walks, another run scored on a wild pitch and a sac fly by Ryan Bealer pulled Post 933 within 9-8.
“I was just trying to make sure our guys were throwing with a clear mind, you just have to throw strikes,” Knechel, the Post 234 catcher on Saturday, said. “If they hit the ball, they hit the ball. You have to keep bringing it. It got a little tight there at the end, but I just had to make sure they kept focused.”
Gulibon got his team out of the fifth with a lead and threw a scoreless fourth inning, getting three of HT’s top batters to fly out while stranding one runner on the bases. Souderton manager Paul Meara credited Gulibon for throwing strikes and also the coolness Knechel brought behind the dish.
“That’s a college kid coming back, very calm, he led our team in hitting, went 4-0 with a 1.3 ERA and he’s catching,” Meara said. “He’s a true leader on the team. He calms everybody down, says ‘relax, everything’s going to be alright.’”
Knechel also gave his team some critical breathing room in the top half of the sixth, when his RBI single to center scored Clemens to push it back to a tworun lead.
Meara was just glad it gave him the chance to put the ball in Bolton’s hands to finish things off. The rising senior at Dock Mennonite Academy had a walk and two hits, but was chomping at the bit to get the ball on the pitcher’s mound.
“He’s a special player, he’s a different player than other kids,” Meara said. “He’s not a pitcher but on this team, he’s the closer. He wanted the ball in the sixth inning but I had to tell him relax, we’ll get it to you.”
The right-hander did his job with a 1-2-3 inning in the seventh to pick up the save.
“I want to get the ball in the end, I want to end the game and throw strikes,” Bolton said. “Whatever we can do to win, that’s what I want to do. We kept saying it’s a long game and we just had to come together and keep playing good baseball.”
Bolton, who just committed to play at Liberty University, expected a tight, intense game on Saturday. It’s part of the competitive respect the two programs have for each other that they just seem to bring out the intensity in one another.
Meara and Drelick are close friends, so the respect starts at the top and flows down. Knechel noted that a lot of it comes from high school ball, where most of the Post 234 players attend Souderton and most of the Post 933 guys go to North Penn and of course, their back-and-forth in the BuxMont standings all summer.
“This was probably the biggest game of the year for us,” Bolton said. “We know all the kids from their team and they’re a good team so we figured it was going to be a great game.”
Hatfield-Towamencin faces either Quakertown or Perkiomen Monday night at 8 for a chance to rematch with Souderton in Tuesday’s championship. Sunday’s games were postponed due to rain.
“Give them credit, maybe Paul talked to them, but they took time, re-gained focus, set up and won,” Drelick said. “I was beat by a team that was better than me tonight. I love Paul, they’re a great team over there and they deserved this win. I’ll learn from it, I’ll play a game tomorrow and maybe see them for two on Monday if we can.” Souderton 10, H-T 8
SOUDERTON 023 401 0 – 10 10 2
HATFIELD-TOWAMENCIN 000 440 0 – 8 4 5
WP: David Gulibon. LP: Zack Thomas. SV: Nolan Bolton. 3B: S – Luke Shank. 2B: S – Moses Clemens. Multiple hits: S – Nolan Bolton 2-4, Moses Clemens 2-4, Luke Shank 2-4, Dan Knechel 2-4