Eagles ready for Rochester in quarterfinal

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HARTLAND — As usual, Hartland baseball coach Brian Morrison wasn’t about to discuss who was going to start in Tuesday’s Division 1 quarterfinal game.

The chances it will be right-hander John Baker are pretty good, but Baker went along with his coach.

Asked if he thought he would pitch this week, he smiled.

“I hope so,” he said. “You never know. We’ll see.”

Morrison has the luxury of having a deep pitching staff going into today’s game against Rochester at Wayne State University.

The game, the second of two played at Wayne State, is scheduled to start at 4 p.m., with the Livingston Post broadcasting the game beginning at 3:50.

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Experience-wise, the teams couldn’t be further apart. Hartland is the defending state  champion, while Rochester hasn’t gotten this far since 1998.

“I know they’ve got a good coach,” Morrison said of Rochester’s Eric Magiera, whose team (24-17) has won 13 of its last 14 games. “They started the season slow and have gotten hot here at the end. They’re a young team and can be dangerous at times.”

The Eagles, on the other hand, returned seven starters from last year’s team, including sophomore third baseman Max Hendricks.

“We’ve been here before, we know how to handle the situation, and I think we’re going to play the way we know how to play,” he said.

It’s a Hartland team that lost two of its first three, then won 25 in a row. It’s a team with as much pitching and defense one could hope for and an offense that gets the job done.

“At the beginning of the year, we couldn’t figure out our hitting,” Baker said. “But now, things are getting pretty tight and we’ve gotten able to work better as a team. Now we want to keep winning.”

It’s a team that, collectively, plays at a steady pace.

“I don’t think they get nervous, and I don’t think they get confident,” Morrison said. “They just play, and as a coach, that’s what you want, because you don’t have to worry about all that other stuff.”

The Eagles played a regular-season doubleheader at Wayne State earlier in the season. The field features, among other things, a Fenway Park-like wall in left field.

“I’d rather play on any college field over a high school field,” Hendricks said.

Aside from the venue, Morrison says this quarterfinal is like most any other game.

“We have to make plays that will help us score one more run than they do, and no one can ever predict that,” he said. “We just have to play a good solid game and score one more run than they do.”

“We’re in the final eight,” Baker said. “So we just kind of stay with the team, keep playing good and hopefully things turn out our way.”

It’s the fourth quarterfinal for Hartland in Morrison’s tenure, and he says the excitement is still there,

“You definitely can’t take it for granted,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who work hard and might not get the opportunity to play in one of them. So you definitely appreciate it when you get it, and hopefully we play well and see what happens in the game.”

The winner will play either Portage Northern or Saline in a semifinal at 5 p.m, Thursday at Michigan State University.

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