Baseball: Mitchelle stays in the groove for Plainfield East

PLAINFIELD – In his previous outing, Plainfield East pitcher Christian Mitchelle threw the first perfect game in Plainfield East baseball history.

After the first two hitters in Monday’s game at Plainfield Central, Mitchelle must have felt like his pitching mojo had abandoned him.

Caleb Coberley singled and Chris Suchoski walloped a double to start the game for the Wildcats in the bottom half of the first inning, and after Mitchelle settled in to strike out the next batter, he was called for a balk that allowed Plainfield Central to score a run.

But Mitchelle took a breathe and refocused, and a locked in Mitchelle is a pretty impressive site. He struck out the next two batters to get out of the inning, and then would only allow one baserunner, a second inning walk to Phillip Carlson, over the next three innings.

Mitchelle finished with 10 strikeouts, allowed that one run and was one out short of a complete game before he reached his pitch count threshold in the seventh inning of Plainfield East’s 6-1 Southwest Prairie Conference victory over Plainfield Central.

“I just didn’t hit a couple of spots in the first inning, and it led to a couple of hits,” Mitchelle said. “But after that I locked in for the rest of the game and everything was perfect.”

Not quite perfect the way that he was in last week’s perfecto against Joliet Central, but still dominating. After the two hits he allowed in the first inning, a ball didn’t leave the infield until the fifth when Tanner Wagnon blooped a single into right field that snapped a string of nine consecutive batters retired by Mitchelle, with 14 of the last 15 sent back to the bench after the two first inning hits.

Mitchelle appeared to be well beyond midseason form, which belies the fact that because of a nagging injury he’d entered the game with only 10 innings pitched to this point in the season.

“That’s the longest he’d gone all year, and I didn’t want to push it too much,” Plainfield East coach Adam O’Reel said. “He started the year with some forearm tightness, so we went two and half weeks without him throwing. It’s not like we’ve been rolling with him a ton. We’ve had others come in and get innings in and get their work in, and kind of got us to this point to be able to use Christian in the conference season.”

Plainfield East (10-8, 6-5) gave Mitchelle some offensive backing right from the start, scoring two runs in the top of the first on and RBI double from Nathan Rudd that scored Mitchelle from first after reaching on the first of four free passes he’d received in the game. Collin Hebrerard brought home Rudd with an RBI groundout.

Plainfield Central trimmed the lead to 2-1 in the first, but the two teams offenses both stalemated for a while until Plainfield East used some advantageous base running to add to its cushion. The Bengals pushed a run across in the fourth when Mitchelle drew the attention of the Plainfield Central defense after he broke from first base. But Plainfield Central wasn’t able to pick off Mitchelle, instead allowing the lead runner, Brady Louck, to score when the rundown had a miscue.

East would perform the same trick again an inning later as part of a three-run top of the fourth that featured only one Bengals hit, of the infield variety.

“We haven’t swung the bats overly aggressively,” O’Reel said. “But we did just enough. I tell the guys pitching and defense, and we’ll figure out how to score runs later. We played clean baseball today, and I think we put a little pressure on them defensively and fortunately they made mistakes for us that helped us take advantage of things.”

Plainfield Central (12-8, 2-7) dropped its fourth consecutive game with the loss and have hit a rough patch in its schedule after starting the season 11-1. Suchowski had two of the Wildcats six hits.