Kelso dumps Missoula
Kelso coach Grady Tweit never told his baseball team what kind of offensive numbers the Missoula Mavericks put up this year.
But he knew, which his why he was a nervous wreck through most of Pacific Tech’s first-round game of the American Legion Northwest Region tournament on a sweltering Friday afternoon at Gonzaga.
Finally, the power-packed
“This dang team, they persevere,” Tweit said. “They’re going to give me 12 more heart attacks. I had about 14 that game.”
Kelso scored its first eight runs in four different innings, including the four-run eighth which broke a 4-4 tie, despite not getting a base runner until two were out.
Backing a multitude of hitting stars, Gillen kept a team that hit .380 with 66 home runs in winning 64 of 73 games, off-balance. After a walk and bloop single to his first two batters that cost starter Mikey Murray a chance at the win and a lead-off home run in the next inning that tied the game again in the seventh, Gillen came up big.
“You have to take your hat off to a kid like that,” Tweit said. “You’ve seen people fold in a hurry after a big shot like that. Our team backed him up. After seeing him get tough, they got tough.”
Both starters scuffled a little but only gave up three runs.
Kelso (31-14) got a run with three-straight singles in the top of the second and two more in the fifth on a home run by Nolan Enriquez, just his second of the season and the second allowed by Missoula starter Andrew Sopko, who turns 16 on Sunday, in more than 80 innings.
A pair of walks and a single tied the game in the bottom of the third and the Mavericks (64-10) tied it again in the sixth with four singles and a walk.
Both teams then scored in the seventh, Kelso with a pair of two out singles sandwiched around a walk and
“I’m the kind of person that gets nervous in tight games,” Gillen said. “But I’ve been in several tight games and I know what to do. … They can definitely hit the ball. After seeing Mikey, who’s hit 94 (mph) before, I only throw about 84-ish, I knew they’d be in front of my ball. I knew I had to slow it down a little more.”
Then came the eighth, when Derrick Salberg and Carl Johnson singled, Lane Sari tripled and Garrett McCoy doubled, all with two outs.
“The difference in that big inning was we changed our approach,” Tweit said. “We went to two-strike hitting. We were trying to pull balls, jerk balls. Just hit up the middle, line drives, that’s what we emphasize here.”
In the five-run ninth, Kelso got a monster three-run home run over the screen in right field from Brandon Middleton.