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ROXANA – Springtime weather can create quite a bit of uncertainty for any high school baseball team.
That uncertainty was the watchword for Monday's IHSA Class 2A Belleville Althoff Regional baseball opening-round game between Madison County backyard rivals East Alton-Wood River and Roxana – especially as forecasts of rain kept coming in.
The Roxana Park baseball field was covered with a tarp as light rain fell right before moved-up start time. The rain eventually let up to the point where the tarp was taken off and the game could get started.
And what a gem of a game it turned out to be – the Shells got a run in the bottom of the first on a Trace Gentry sacrifice fly, and it turned out to be the only run of the game as the Oilers' Blake Marks and the Shells' Tanner Davis hooked up in a magnificent pitcher's duel. The game ended only in the top of the seventh when the Shells' Blake Vandiver gunned out the Oilers' Cody Blacklock trying to tie the game with two out on a Zach Wells single.
“Especially the way the weather was, with the wet grass,” said Oiler coach Kyle Duncan on his decision to send Blacklock. “He's (Vandiver) got to make a perfect throw, and he did.”
And that perfect throw from Vandiver preserved a 1-0 Shells win to advance them into a 4 p.m. Wednesday semifinal matchup against the host Crusaders at Belleville's Whitey Herzog Field.
The uncertainty of whether the game was going to come off played into Shells' coach Scott Harper's strategy. “Going through, not sure if we were going to play and we had them (the Shells) waiting in the locker room,” Harper said. “The tarp crew had to pull (the tarp) off to get the field prepped, then they had to put it back on, then take it off again – the whole team had to go through that.
“But Tanner (Davis) – big-game pitcher. He's improved so much for us and that was huge for him. He did everything he could there and then obviously you gotta have that big throw at the end to put him (Blacklock) out at the plate.”
Davis played a key role in the game's only run; Chance Foss and Vandiver both singled off Marks to open the bottom of the first, and Davis executed a sacrifice bunt to move up both runners. Gentry then stepped up and delivered a RBI sacrifice fly to center to bring in Foss and give the Shells a huge early lead.
“Getting runs off of Blake, it was going to be tough,” Harper said of the decision to have Davis lay down the sacrifice bunt in the first. “and you just never know with the conditions, plus we didn't know if this (the weather) was going to open up and what we were going to get in today, are we back here tomorrow – just trying to get on the board and make something happen and obviously, that's what we had to do.”
From that point, both Davis and Marks kept the offenses at bay; Davis wound up with four strikeouts while conceding six hits and also got a couple of big defensive plays as the game unfolded. Marks, for his part, wound up five strikeouts while giving up three hits, none until the seventh following the two leadoff singles.
In that decisive seventh, Zaid Wilson led off with a walk and was replaced by Justin Engler to pinch-run; Engler was thrown out trying to steal and Davis struck out Hunter Hall to quickly get to two outs. Blacklock and Bryce Bazzell then walked and Davis suddenly found himself with two on and two out with Wells coming to bat.
Wells stroked a 1-0 pitch to center to Vandiver and Duncan decided to try to score Blacklock; the throw got to Shells catcher Chad Mott in time and Blacklock tried to jump past Mott to avoid the tag, but Mott managed to get the tag on Blacklock to win the game.
“They (Roxana) got the job done, but I wouldn't take back that decision to send him,” Duncan said.
The Shells moved to 15-17 on the year with the win; the Oilers, who still have a Prairie State Conference contest remaining with Bunker Hill, were eliminated at 13-19 after starting the season 2-13.
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