CADIZ, Ohio — Squaring off with a really good Morgantown High baseball team, Steubenville (Ohio) knew coming into Friday’s OVAC championship game they could not afford to make mistakes.
Unfortunately for Steubenville, they made a few and the Mohigans were able to capitalize for a 4-1 victory to leave Mazeroski Field with the OVAC Class 5A trophy.
“I feel like we gave them three runs on mental mistakes and errors and you just can’t do that against a team and pitcher like that,” Big Red head coach Justin Banks said.
It is Morgantown’s third-straight OVAC championship.
“I’m real proud of this team, real proud of their effort,” Morgantown head coach Pat Sherald said. “This is three years in a row these guys have come up here and competed.
“Steubenville is a very good team, it was the first time we had played them in years. They have a ton of talent up and down the line up. I’m just really proud of the effort.”
Big Red committed three errors in the game and two of Morgantown’s runs were unearned.
Despite the miscues, though, Big Red was a couple of inches away from a very different outcome.
After cutting Morgantown’s lead to 2-1 in the fifth, Steubenville had the bases loaded up and just one out. Royal Mayo laced a ball down the left field line that would have easily been a bases-clearing double, but it landed just foul. Big Red went on to leave the bases loaded.
“I think it was about an inch foul,” Banks said. “It was a good call, it was foul, not by much, but it was foul. That’s just the way baseball goes sometimes.”
The lone Big Red run came after Mohigans starter Slade Barton, a WVU singee, threw four no-hit innings, striking out eight batters without a walk.
“He’s darn-near unhittable when he’s on and he was on today,” Banks said. “That’s going to help us for the tournament seeing a Division I caliber pitcher throwing a 91 mile per hour fastball with an 82 mile per hour slider. You don’t see that a lot and that’s the kind of pitching we’re going to see if we get where we want to go.”
He was named the game’s MVP afterwards. Barton was lifted prior to the fifth and replaced by Jackson Bredeson, last year’s MVP. He worked out of the jam in the fifth and ended up with a three inning save.
“Our pitchers really did a great job today,” Sherald said. “We didn’t have any walks, they pounded the strike zone.”
After a scoreless first inning, Morgantown struck first in the bottom of the second when Bredeson tripled to lead the inning off and scored on an RBI groundout from Luca Mezzanotte.
Bredeson then had an RBI single in the fourth inning to make it 2-0.
Big Red cut the deficit in half when Mason Chmielorski had an RBI knock in the fifth, the third hit of the inning, but Bredeson was able to escape with the lead intact.
After AJ Borsch replaced Matt Fabbro (four innings pitched, one strikeout, one walk), Morgantown added a run to the lead with some help from Big Red miscues as B Gorby led off with a walk, got to second on an error, then came around and scored on another error.
Nolan Blackburn came on for Big Red and fired the last two innings, the only run charged to him was also unearned, coming on an error in the sixth that made it 4-1.
Big Red stranded a man in the sixth and went down in order in the seventh, Bredeson fanning two of the final three batters to close the door.
— Story by Andrew Grimm, The Herald Star
