Plainfield East looks to continue to defy the odds

During Plainfield East’s regional championship win over Plainfield Central a coach of another school offered a sage opinion on why the Bengals might continue to outplay their seed and continue to defy the odds.

“They’ve got pitching. And when you’ve got pitching you can get it a lot of stuff done,” he said.

Plainfield East does indeed have pitching. And the 13th seeded team in a sectional complex has continued to dispatch it correctly in riding the wave all the way to the Class 4A State Tournament.

The upstart Bengals (17-15) are looking to pull off two more “upsets” this weekend in the one-day state tournament that will be played at DuPage Medical Group on Saturday. They will challenge Hononegah (26-2) in the semifinal round at 10 a.m. A win would place Plainfield East in the 7 p.m. title game. The third place game is slated for 4 p.m.

Plainfield East’s run to the state tournament would have been difficult to forecast midway through the season when it was in the midst of six game slide in mid-April, but according to head coach Adam O’Reel he learned a lot about his team during the struggle.

“We’ve had good teams here and we’ve had some very talented teams. And this team when we started out, we were below .500,” O’Reel said. “But everyone was kind of in the same situation, we were trying to figure these guys out, we hadn’t seen some of these guys in two years. As we figured it out, they were great teammates. They never got mad if that guy didn’t play or this guy played ahead of them, they just kind of saw how this worked. This is the most satisfying thing because we what they went through.”

The one constant during the postseason run has been exemplary pitching. The Bengals have a trio of top flight arms and have managed to maneuver through the postseason without over-taxing any of them in what has been a very condensed postseason.

But now, there’s been enough of a gap in the schedule as super-sectional games were held on Monday to give the Bengals a chance to reset most if not all of their pitch count limits heading into Saturday.

Sophomore sensation Brady Louck, a Notre Dame commit, should be available to attempt a follow-up to a resplendent effort against Brother Rice in the Super-Sectional. Louck leads the team with 78 strikeouts, with Gavin Schmitt is just behind with 75 and likely also figures prominently in the Plainfield East plan this weekend. Christian Mitchelle is also a stellar pitcher having served as a closer in multiple games during the Bengal run.

All three put together is what has made Plainfield East so difficult to knock out of this postseason and a reason to believe that they could continue the improbable run even now in the state tournament.

Hononegah will try to crush Cinderella’s slipper. The Indians also sport an impressive pitching staff and their top two throwers, Scott Porter an Ryan Anderson, have a combined 20-0 record on the season. Anderson has allowed just four earned runs in 58 innings pitched, good for a 0.48 earned run average.

Any way you slice this game it would be surprising if it didn’t evolve into a pitcher’s duel. For Plainfield East, the key to making sure that happens from their perspective will be trying to limit the damage Hononegah slugger Noah Goddard who enters the state tournament with a gaudy .512 batting average that includes 21 extra-base hits.

The other semifinal features Lake Park and O’Fallon. O’Fallon was responsible for ousting both Joliet West and Providence from the postseason in the previous two rounds of the tournament.