The Aplington-Parkersburg baseball team did just enough to get past AGWSR in a 3-0 win Friday, as aired on 99 The Wave.
In a defensive battle where the teams combined for seven hits, the Falcons scored all their runs in the fourth inning. Kolbon Hoppenworth drove in a run on a fielder’s choice for a 1-0 lead. With two outs, Mick Steege reached on an error to allow another run to score, followed on the next pitch by Preston Janssen hitting a single to drive in the final run. Each team had a limited number of scoring opportunities throughout the rest of the game, and the Falcons hung on.
“AGWSR has been playing some good baseball,” AP junior Sully Janssen says. “They’ve hung around. The record may not show it, but they play some good baseball and they hang around and they’re a tough team to beat. They’ve been a tough team to beat for a lot of teams in the NICL all year. So we knew it would be a battle tonight and we knew we had a job to do.”
Preston Janssen led offensively with three hits. Starting pitcher Wes Shirk had two strikeouts and two walks.
AGWSR coach Justin Kerns says the team was competitive the whole game.
“Going into the game, we had a certain amount of pitches for Kingston, where we were wanting to keep him under a number for next week,” Kerns says. “We’ve got a busy week next week, and we had that for our second pitcher also. Seven pitches in, it gets drilled off the elbow hard enough to leave the laces in his skin. He comes out earlier than expected. We made some defensive changes. I thought the boys still responded well. We had, I would say, one error. That one error didn’t cost us the game. It just deflated us, and we just couldn’t mentally come back from that. And that to me was the key to the game, where we just wouldn’t let ourselves get back into it.”
Kingston Holman pitched 3.1 innings in separate appearances. On the seventh pitch of the game, he was drilled in the elbow by a line drive and subbed out, but returned in the fifth inning. He recorded four strikeouts and one walk. Clay Buseman pitched 3.1 innings with six strikeouts and two walks.
In their next action, AGWSR will host East Marshall for a doubleheader, and Aplington-Parkersburg will host Denver for a doubleheader Monday.
