For The Tribune
On Trinity Lutheran baseball’s senior day, it was a game of delays and victory.
Although, the game was delayed due to New Washington’s late arrival, and delayed again due to the Mustang’s pitcher Jesse Clemmons getting hit directly in the head by an errant throw, and delayed further due to the weather, the Cougars still were successful.
Trinity dominated the early part of game one of their doubleheader until a letdown in the fifth and sixth innings, but still hung on to beat a determined Mustang team by a score of 12-8.
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The Cougars were leading 12-3 going into the fifth inning.
In the fifth, the Mustangs bats came to life as they scored five runs.
However, relief pitcher Bobby Tabeling blanked the Mustangs in the seventh to pick up the save.
Schult, who gave up four hits, and two runs was credited with the win. Nick Mensendiek, gave up seven hits, and six runs in relief.
Coach Bob Tabeling thought it was a good experience for his young pitcher, Mensendiek, who worked out of two tough innings.
For the game the Cougars had 12 hits and committed no errors.
“We’ve been talking to the players about doing all three (fielding, hitting, and pitching) and we are trying to find consistency of getting those three going at the same time,” Tabeling said. “Offensively we’ve been putting runs on the board, so we’ve got to get all three pieces of the puzzle working at the same time.
“They came back and scored four runs and that’s been our trend this year. We’ve got to finish out a game. We play hard at the beginning and then we lose focus. We have a tendency to give up runs late and we’ve got to find a way through that. They came out swinging the bats and that’s how they started off the second game, too. We were fortunate to get that first win but offensively we are doing a lot of good things.”
The second game was called after two innings.
“The bases started to puddle up and the Mustangs coach was concerned about his pitcher getting hurt so the game was called,” Tabeling said.
The Cougars move to 10-12 for the season and have a challenging week ahead playing at Henryville on Tuesday and Rising Sun at home Friday.