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Hanover’s surprise run ends
Updated: June 20, 2011 2:48PM
INDIANAPOLIS — Andy Wellwerts didn’t leap off the field in celebration or anything, but the Hanover Central ace and his teammates felt awfully good about things as they walked off the field after the top of the first inning in Saturday’s Class 2A state championship game.
Sure, the Wildcats were down 1-0 before they even came to bat. But it could have been so much worse. Big-hitting South Spencer had loaded the bases on a single, a walk and a bunt with nobody out, but came away with just one run. That’s because Wellwerts struck out three straight batters to wriggle out of the jam — a run-scoring wild pitch the only blemish.
Everything was playing out just like it did in last week’s semistate win over Taylor.
“It reminded me a lot of last week,” Hanover coach Doug Nelson said. “I thought, heck, we can do this, we can jump on them now.”
It didn’t happen. Jordan Meece didn’t let it happen.
Hanover Central’s dream season ended on a sour note with an 8-1 loss to South Spencer at Victory Field. And while the state champion Rebels got to Indianapolis on the strength of an unstoppable offense, it was the soft-tossing Meece that won this game.
Using a nifty array of off-speed pitches, the 6-foot-2 Meece had Hanover flailing at the plate all game. He lost his shutout on a wild pitch with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the seventh, allowing Evan Garthius — pinch-running after a Nick Bollenbacher double — to score. Hanover had just five hits all game, two of them in the seventh.
“We just picked a bad day to get cold,” Nelson said. “We worked on it this week, talked about staying back and going the other way, but it’s a big difference when you go live.”
Indeed, nerves were a factor for the Wildcats, at least early.
“I was just too excited,” Wellwerts said.
But it didn’t prove too costly, thanks to Wellwerts’ ability to extricate himself from sticky situations. Three times in the first four innings, he stranded a South Spencer runner at third base.
Still, it took Wellwerts more than 40 pitches to finish the first, and he had thrown more than 80 through three innings. In the fifth, the Rebels scored two runs on a Meece RBI single (he was 3-for-5 with three RBI on top of his stellar pitching) and an Aaron Seiler sacrifice fly.
The way Meece was pitching — Hanover had just two hits at this point, and one was on an attempted sacrifice bunt — that 3-0 lead felt like 30-0.
“It’s in the back of your head all the time, but you’re trying not to think about it because this team is capable of anything,” said Hanover sophomore Dan Stum. “We could have pulled it out. It just wasn’t in the cards for us.”
The wheels then fell off for Hanover (22-6) in the sixth. Jared Lauer had an RBI single and Meece had a two-run double to chase Wellwerts. Nic Sampognaro was greeted on his first pitch by an RBI single by Justin Wead to make it 7-0, and Wead later scored on a wild pitch to cap the five-run inning, giving the Rebels (24-6) an 8-0 lead and putting to rest any hopes of a Hanover comeback.
It was a disappointing end for Wellwerts, who was phenomenal all season. He entered the game 9-0 with a 1.03 ERA and 120 strikeouts in just 67 innings, but he allowed seven runs — six earned — on nine hits in the last game of his terrific career. He struck out eight, including six in the first three innings.
Wellwerts shrugged off talk that he was battling a sore shoulder thanks to the heavy workload he carried over the last month, saying he didn’t want to make any excuses.
“I should have done better,” is all he said.
The loss stung the most for Wellwerts and other seniors, such as Sampognaro, Mike Balich and Nick Laing, as their careers came to a bitter end. But the pride in a remarkable season — one very few people, in and out of Hanover’s inner circle, saw coming — was still there as they accepted their red runner-up medals and posed with the first of what the Wildcats hope is many postseason trophies.
“Nobody gave us any credit going into this season — nobody even gave us any credit around sectional time,” sophomore catcher Zac Maciejewski said. “We showed a lot of people we know how to play. We just had a bad day.”
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