JOLIET – The Lincoln-Way East baseball team has struggled with a significant number of injuries this season.
Griffins coach Eric Brauer readily admits that he doesn’t expect opponents, especially those the Griffins largely have gotten the better of in recent years, to feel too sorry for them.
What he hadn’t particularly been happy with, however, was his own team’s response to those injuries. Players who had been afforded extra opportunities had not seized their chances.
Some of that changed for the better in Brauer’s eyes Tuesday night at DuPage Medical Group Field. The Griffins got ample contributions from multiple spots on their roster as it upended rival Lincoln-Way Central, 11-7.
“We have a lot of guys getting opportunities, and right now we are just going out there and trying to accelerate our growth,” Brauer said. “We are dinged up. And we’ve got a lot of guys who are maybe not young, but inexperienced, but I really like the way we responded to our adversity tonight. We did some things early really poorly, and earlier in the year, we kind of threw in the towel in the situation. But tonight I thought we really battled hard.”
One of those situations came early in Tuesday’s game. Lincoln-Way Central’s half of the second inning exploded into a run bonanza for the Knights. With the bases loaded with one out, Landon Mensik bounced a clean single into the outfield. Logically, the play should have netted Lincoln-Way Central at most two runs. But a fielding error allowed all three runners to score, and Mensik ended up at third base as the Knights claimed an early 4-1 lead.
Brauer’s concern that his team might fold up after the mishap wasn’t to be though. The Griffins added a run in the third to cut the lead in half, then really went on the attack in its half of the fourth inning, scoring five runs. They tied the game on an unusual play, scoring two runs on a Zach Kwasny sacrifice fly to tie the game and adding two more runs on RBI hits from John Connors and Jack Hoh to give them a 6-4 lead they wouldn’t relinquish.
The Griffins (9-2) also got a heroic effort out of the bullpen from Connor Bird. Bird entered the game in the second inning after the error put Mensik at third. Although he allowed the run to score, he completed the game, darting in and out of serious trouble, allowing three hits in his four-plus innings of work.
“You don’t put Bird in the second inning and expect him to finish the game,” Brauer said. “That’s an unbelievable effort from him.”
Brauer isn’t sure if and when the players who are ailing might be able to return to the lineup, but he knows he feels significantly better about the players he does currently have available than he may have before.
“Everybody on our team has gotten to play this year. Last year, we only played about 11 guys the whole year, this year, every guy that comes out here and is healthy and has a uniform on is coming to the park with a chance to play,” Brauer said. “And I feel like tonight was a really big step for us in the right direction. Because at times this year I haven’t always liked the way we’ve responded to the opportunities in front of us, but tonight we responded.”
Mensik, Jack Barret and Kyle Connelly all had two-hit games for Lincoln-Way Central (2-3).