Julius Sanchez dominates, L-P offense solid in win over Morris

OGLESBY — On a beautiful evening for baseball, La Salle-Peru ace Julius Sanchez turned in a big-time performance on the mound, allowing three hits while striking out 11 batters to lead the Cavaliers to an 11-2 victory over Morris in an Interstate Eight Conference game.

“This may be the best complete game we played all year,” L-P coach Matt Glupczynski said. “We played solid defense, got good pitching, ground out at-bats and got big hits when we needed them.

“Julius pitched well tonight, but we know what we are going to get when he goes to the mound and he always gives us a chance to win. I’m happy with the effort and the way we played tonight.”

The Cavs struck first when Jack Scheri led off the bottom of the first inning with a single and was sacrificed over to third.

After a pair of walks, a Morris error allowed the first two runs of the game to come in. L-P tacked on a third run on a wild pitch to take a 3-0 lead after one inning.

Sanchez struck out all three batters he faced in the second to get the Cavs back up to bat.

After a pair of infield hits by Brendan Boudreau and Brady Romagnoli, Scheri plated the first run with a groundout and the second run of the inning scored on a balk to extend L-P’s lead to 5-0 after two innings.

After a scoreless third, Sanchez allowed his first base runner of the game on a walk, but pitched around it.

L-P answered with a lead-off double by Josh Senica, who came around to score on a Morris miscue to make it 6-0.

Morris got on the board when Brennan Johnson reached on an infield hit, got to third on a Cavalier error and scored on a wild pitch.

In the home half of the frame, Seth Adams reached on an error and came around to score on an RBI double to the gap by Aiden Van Duzer, who later scored on a sacrifice fly off the bat of Boudreau to give L-P an 8-2 advantage after five.

Morris scratched across another run in the sixth on a pair of hits from Griffin Zweeres and Jack Wheeler.

But L-P tacked on a few more in the bottom half with Scheri smacking a one-out single, promptly stealing second and scoring on a two-out single by Sanchez.

“I was happy to get on and steal a base and Julius did a great job driving me home,” Scheri said. “The most important thing was to get a win and I think everyone contributed today. It was a team victory. We have a couple more big conference games coming up and this will help our confidence going forward and then into the postseason.”

L-P was not done as Van Duzer drilled his second RBI double of the game and came home on a Billy Mini single to make the score 11-2.

Mason Lynch got the final three outs of the game for L-P, sitting Morris down in order, including two strikeouts.

“We are young and are learning,” Morris coach Todd Kein said. “We made some costly mistakes that we can learn from. I was happy with the team fighting the whole game against a pretty good pitcher.”