L. Mollenkopf, Herd combine for 7 hits, but 4 errors costly for Caston in regional loss to FW Blackhawk
- Val T.
- 53 minutes ago
- 7 min read
BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
FORT WAYNE — The Caston baseball team was leading Fort Wayne Blackhawk 2-1 in the third inning of their Class 1A regional at Carroll High School Saturday.
The Braves had the bases loaded and one out. Maxwell Warner, Fort Wayne Blackhawk’s No. 3 hitter who had gone 4 for 7 in two sectional games against Fremont and Fort Wayne Canterbury with all four hits going for extra bases, was up.
Caston’s Carson Harness struck him out.
Now could Harness get Kyler Wood out? Wood had also gone 4 for 7 in two sectional games.
Harness threw strike one. Then he threw ball one. On the third pitch, Wood sent a fly ball to deep right-center field. Caston center fielder Logan Mollenkopf chased and chased after it.
But he could not quite get it. All three runners were running on contact. All three runners scored.
Everything that happened in the game could seemingly be divided into what happened before that at-bat and what happened after.
Wood went 2 for 2 with five RBIs, and Isaac Stayton also had two RBIs as Fort Wayne Blackhawk went on to win 12-6.
“I thought we handled Warner pretty well today,” Caston coach Blake Mollenkopf said. “He’s their guy. Wood did a good job of just going with the pitch. They did a good job there. And so they had a big hit, and Wood cleaned it up a couple times.”
The Braves improved to 9-14 and will take on Caston’s Hoosier North rival North Miami in a semistate semifinal at Loeb Stadium in Lafayette at 11 a.m. this Saturday.
Rossville will take on Kouts in the second semifinal at approximately 2 p.m., and the winners return at 7 p.m. for the semistate final.
Caston finished 21-5. They remain in search of their first baseball regional title.
Mollenkopf went 4 for 4 with an RBI and two runs scored, and London Herd went 3 for 4 with an RBI. Eli Holloway added two hits, and Lucius Edson doubled and walked in three plate trips.
Parker Zimpleman drove in two runs, and Gavin Mollenkopf also had an RBI in his prep baseball finale.
Caston outhit Fort Wayne Blackhawk 10-6, but Caston’s pitchers walked six, hit two batters and threw three wild pitches. Caston also had four errors as compared to Fort Wayne Blackhawk’s none.
Coach Mollenkopf praised the defense for its role in beating South Newton, Tri-County and West Central in the sectional. It was leaky this time however.
“We just weren’t as clean in our plays,” coach Mollenkopf said. “It felt like even the plays we made defensively were bang-bang where we were just a tick behind and we weren’t getting that ball, so it felt like everything was a tick slow today.”
After Wood’s three-run double, he went to third on a wild pitch and scored on Grant Knudson’s single to center field. Stayton’s ground ball to third turned into an error, with Knudson coming all the way around to score from first.
And Byron Opliger ripped a double to the left-center field fence to score Stayton easily and make it 7-2.
“They’ve been pretty good all year at not getting too far out of the zone, which sometimes causes us to take too many strikes,” Fort Wayne Blackhawk coach Kevin Kinnison said. “But they’re usually pretty disciplined as far as in the strike zone, so they’ve done a good job all year.”
Kinnison called Wood’s three-run double “huge.”
“I think if you make an out in that inning, it puts a little bit more pressure on our shoulders,” Kinnison said. “It raises them up a little bit. I think that was a big turning point of the game.”
Harness moved to center field, and Logan Mollenkopf came into pitch. Harness pitched in all four of Caston’s state tournament games, starting three of them.
“He just didn’t have the feel for his curve ball,” coach Mollenkopf said. “I think he was trying to place his fastball too much. Early, he got it by them… but he just never got control of the breaking ball in the zone, which made us throw a lot more fastballs. I think he tried to pinpoint it too much. We had some walks there, and they had a big hit, that double with two outs. That was a big breaker in the game. He just didn’t have his ‘A’ stuff, but I felt down the line, Logan was the same way. He kinda fought it today. Brodie, in the seventh, I thought he was clean, but in the sixth, he kinda fought it.
“We just weren’t as sharp today, but they competed, and they gave it what they could.”
Zimpleman’s RBI groundout scored Herd, who had doubled and advanced to third on a passed ball, in the bottom of the third, but Fort Wayne Blackhawk tacked on to the lead in the fourth on an RBI single from Wood and Logan Mollenkopf’s run scoring wild pitch.
Logan Mollenkopf’s RBI groundout to short made it 9-4 in the fifth, but a nifty scoop in the dirt from Knudson at first kept Caston from a bigger inning.
Fort Wayne Blackhawk scored three more unearned runs off Logan Mollenkopf in the sixth Wood drove in the first run on a sacrifice fly to Elijah Zabel in right field. Brady Ellington scored on a passed ball, and Stayton drove in a run with a sacrifice fly to center.
Brodie Howard pitched the final 1 ⅔ hitless innings. He walked none and struck out two.
An RBI single from Logan Mollenkopf in the home half of the sixth drove home Lucius Edson, who had doubled, to make it 12-5. Zimpleman’s RBI grounder in the seventh closed out the scoring.
Warner threw 111 pitches and allowed 10 hits and five earned runs. He walked three and fanned five.
Warner did not start either of Fort Wayne Blackhawk’s sectional games, and Ellington led the team in innings pitched. Still, coach Mollenkopf was not surprised that Kinnison chose Warner.
“Warner’s their guy,” coach Mollenkopf said. “Ellington is a senior and a nice pitcher, but I don’t even think they would have brought in him. They have a couple other guys ahead of him. But he’s logged a lot of innings for them, but if you look at their schedule and their wins and when they Homestead, when they play Leo, when they play all those schools and they’re in ballgames, Warner’s the guy on the hill. … We had 10 hits and six runs. Offensively, we did what we needed to do. We just needed to clean it up on the other side of the ball.”
Caston was ready to go.
Harness struck out the side in the top half. In the bottom half, Logan Mollenkopf led off with a double and went to third on Eli Holloway’s single. Gavin Mollenkopf struck out, and Braves catcher Chip Bennett then picked off Holloway on a backpick throw with Herd at the plate.
But Herd redeemed the inning with an RBI bloop single just in front of Amstutz in left.
Fort Wayne Blackhawk scored a run without a hit in the second. Wood led off with a walk, stole second, went to third on a wild pitch and scored on Isaac Stayton’s chopper over the mound on which a charging second baseman Howard threw to first for an out.
Caston reclaimed the lead in the second. Edson walked with two outs. Logan Mollenkopf then hit a liner to deep left. Amstutz sold out, diving parallel with the ground to try and make a diving catch. He missed, and the ball rolled to the wall. Edson, running on the ping of the bat, scored from first.
Bennett reached on an error to start the third and went to second on Carson Joseph’s sacrifice bunt. Amstutz walked, and Ellington reached on an infield hit to load the bases.
Warner was heading to the plate.
Comet notes
The start of the game was pushed back from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. to allow the grass field to dry out after overnight rains continued into the morning. Temperatures were in the 80s, and the game was played in humid conditions.
Caston also lost to Fort Wayne Blackhawk 16-6 in five innings in the 2012 regional semifinals at Caston. Kinnison knew Mollenkopf through that game and because Caston was a frequent regional site during his tenure. Kinnison and Mollenkopf are both Huntington University graduates.
“Great guy, great family,” Kinnison said of Mollenkopf. “I told him before the game that’s awesome that you get to coach your sons. It’s like I told him after the game, I said, ‘You guys wouldn’t go away. I know you didn’t get the outcome you wanted, but man, you guys battled and didn’t make it easy for us at all.’ It was just one of those days. I think if you play another day, it’s going to possibly be a different game because both teams battled. This is baseball. Ours found holes; theirs didn’t. The two-out hits were important.”
Even though the game was a much shorter drive for Fort Wayne Blackhawk, it appeared that Caston had a comparable number of, if not more, fans.
“I just want to tell them thank you,” coach Mollenkopf said. “They’re a great group of people that support these kids. I know the kids appreciate it and the coaches appreciate it. It’s a long drive, and they did a great job of being here for them. It was great to see that much red, white and blue.”
Fort Wayne Blackhawk 12, Caston 6
FW Blackhawk 016 203 0 – 12 6 0
Caston 111 011 1 – 6 10 4
WP – Maxwell Warner (7 IP, 10 H, 6 R, 5 ER, 3 BB, 5 K)
LP – Carson Harness (2 ⅔ IP, 4 H, 7 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 4 K)
2B – Kyler Wood (FWB), Byron Opliger (FWB), Logan Mollenkopf 2 (CAS), London Herd (CAS), Eli Holloway (CAS), Lucius Edson (CAS)
