By Ed Muniz-Photos by Renee Kaspar
**Additional photos are available for Purchase at https://justallsports.zenfolio.com/p605566886 **
The Grey Division of the 10U West Suburban Baseball League saw action on the Diamond when division leading Lisle Wolves played host to the visiting Winfield Wolves.
Coming into this game, Lisle, under the tutelage of Head Coach Mike McGrath, had seen quite a bit of success. The Lisle squad had won 9 of 12 games and secured a first place standing.
The mixture of 9 and 10-year-olds has played cohesively and gelled well enough to earn them the top of the standings.
For the Winfield Wolves and Head Coach Dan Adams, the season has had its difficulties. Mired in third place, the 15 games previously played had only fruited 4 victories.
They display the ability to hit the ball well but that hasn’t added to many pluses in the win column.
“Our pitching has been our issue and paying attention,” said Adams.
Adams didn’t see that in this game. Good hitting and defensive plays secured their fifth win in the 5-4 upset of Lisle.
“Today the kids are pretty happy,” said Adams. “We played well. Our pitching was good, we had all three of our pitchers go two innings each. Usually, I got to pull a pitcher, or walks kill us, so it was good today. It’s nice to get a win in after losing our last game, so its good to comeback and get a win,”
“That’s a good team, we are good friends, me and their coach, we play a lot, so they are a great team to scrimmage against. They are well coached too.”
Starting the game on the mound was Hudson McGrath for Lisle. After striking out the first batter, he issued a walk. At this level, a walk quickly turns out to a guy on third, two pitches later.
Runners get such a huge jump on pitches, it’s nearly futile to attempt a throw to second. Pitcher’s control is also a contributor as catcher are trying to block pitches in the dirt nearly on every batter.
After reaching third, Winfield’s James Zalatoris saw an opportunity to score on a wild pitch scampering home, a quick retrieve by Lisle catcher Brady Tertell saw him toss the ball to McGrath who rushed in to cover home and applied the tag for the out. McGrath then struck out the next batter ending Winfields first at-bats.
Winfield starting pitcher Zalatoris now took to the mound and retired the first two batters on a come back to him and a strike out, walked a batter who reached third but was left there when he got a grounder to second to end the first inning.
The second inning saw scoring by both teams. Winfield pushed across two runs. Both Avery Rosin and Gabe Herron scored. Rosin singled while Herron reached base after striking out and a throw down from the catcher to first was misplayed.
Rosin scored on the error at first and a single by Antonio Engstrom drove in another run before McGrath got the third out by strikeout.
In McGraths’ two-inning stint, he came away with 6 strikeouts, four of which were in one inning.
Lisle came back with three runs of their own to take an early lead, the only lead as it turned out, they would have the entire game.
Brady Tertell kick-started the Lisle surge with a lead-off single, he advanced around to third. He scored on Beckett Milostan’s single after a walk to Louis Tinucci.
Louis Tinucci then scored on Sully Russel’s at-bat on a grounder to first. Milostan then scored on Liam Sciacca hit. The three-run inning vaulted the Lisle Wolves ahead 3-2 after two innings.
It took the Winfield Wolves just a half inning later to regain the lead, managing to plate two off Lisle pitcher’ Nick Williams.
Williams was greeted by a double off the bat of Eli Day. A Single two batters later by Kingston Dale scored Day. Dale would score on a ground out by Rosin to second. The two runs gave Winfield a 4-3 lead headed to the bottom of the inning.
Lisle managed to get a runner to third when Mike Tinucci was issued a walk and got to third on steals, but a liner hit by Williams to first was caught and saw Mike Tinucci wander too far off third and was picked off for the double play that ended the Lisle opportunity to even the game.
Winfield extended their lead, pushing across another run in the top of the fourth. Benjy Hepburn hit a ball to third that went right through the wickets. That error would eventually score on a groundout to shortstop before Cam Tertell retired the Winfield effort with a strikeout.
Trailing 5-3, Lisle was desperate for runs as innings expired. Hard throwing Day was on the mound for his second inning but ran into some trouble with control.
Lisle put two on to begin their fourth at-bats. Both Cam Tertell and Ethan Terrell reached on Day’s wildness with walks. Both advanced to second and third with no outs. Running mistakes would turn a positive start into no runs.
A wild pitch by Day had Cam Tertell first go then not, seeing Tertell go, Terrell ran to third while Tertell tried to go back to third, Unfortunately, he then felt he had no choice and ran towards home and was easily put out.
Day struck out the next batter and a ground out to short ending the promising start.
Day wasn’t happy with his overall performance.
“Sometimes things affect me, and I lose control after that,” said Hard-throwing Day. “I feel I can’t control the ball much, but we have a pitching coach, and he has taught us about bending at the back and I realize I haven’t been doing that much lately, so I think I need to start doing that. I’m not happy how I batted, lead off is tough for me. I strikeout before I hit it. I just need to keep my eye on the ball.”
Lisle went to their ace on the mound the last two innings, Brady Tertell proceeded to shut down the visiting Wolves, striking out five of the six batters he faced, allowing no one on base.
“I pitch the most for my team so get in most of the games and starts,” said Brady.
“I play a couple positions; I have no problem going from catcher to pitcher. I thought my fastball was working pretty good, I was throwing it right in the zone. I just try to get it in the zone; a couple people can hit me but mostly, kids are just watching the ball go by or swinging and missing.”
“My coaches really help me, and I try to adjust what they tell me when things aren’t working.”
After scoring a run in their fifth at-bats when Milostan doubled and then later scored on a wild pitch, Lisle was down to their last three outs short a run at 5-4.
After a groundout to Winfield shortstop’ Kingston Dale, and a strike out. Winfield’s Avery Rosin needed just one more out.
But Williams was having none of it and singled with an infield hit and advanced to second on an errant throw by Rosin.
Williams got to third one pitch later and was 60 feet away from tying the game.
Cam Tertell was anxious at the plate and looked for a good pitch. He got it and struck a hard grounder to short. Dale effortlessly picked up the grounder and rifled a throw to first a step ahead of Cam for the final out of the game and the 5-4 victory for the Winfield Wolves.
Kingston Dale was stellar defensively and showed it during his stint at shortstop.
“A lot of balls were coming to me, so my heart was beating really fast,” said Dale “When I had the ball, knew I had to make the third out, so I just fielded the ball and threw it. I worked on having a strong arm by practicing but it started when I was playing tee-ball.”
Lisle bats all 12 of their players while in this case, Winfield batted just nine as that’s all they had at the game; thus, Winfield went through their batting order more frequently, it can affect scoring opportunities.
Leading the Lisle offense was Milostan. His two hits including a double were the reason he scored twice.
“I was protecting with two strikes really well on both at-bats, I had two strikes and got on base twice” said the hitting star. “I saw they were overthrowing the ball so I kept running which I don’t normally do. I need to stop getting mad in my head when I fall behind. As a team we need to do base running better, there were a lot of pass balls with people on third and we didn’t score when they should have. That’s the player’s fault.”
Coach McGrath added; “We stranded a few today, we knew that team, they’re a good team, they hit the ball well, they’re well coached, they have a bunch of kids that show a lot of attitude out there which is great.”
“I thought we played pretty good today, thought our pitchers pitched well, but I thought our plate approach was a bit soft today. Our strategy was to move our runners around, we just couldn’t accomplish that today, we fought hard and lost every inning except for one but we stuck in there and the kids showed a lot of heart.”
“Attitude and effort is what we tell them to play with and they did. I thought defensively we allowed them to get into the game and take control of the game. Thought at one point if we could put together three clean outs, we would of have been in a position to comeback and show some energy at the plate but unfortunately, defensive errors allowed them to continue innings.”
Other Winfield Wolves adding to the win include Will Adams and Ben Sabados.
The Lisle Wolves also had great effort from Jet Thomas and Kabir Shah.
