BRIGHTON — It was in the end, your usual Hartland-Brighton baseball clash on Wednesday.
Good pitching, high emotion, close.
Rarely, if ever, has a game been decided on a balk and two wild pitches.
But that’s how Hartland scored all three of its runs, and lefty starter Gannon Grundman (2-0) made them stand up by striking out 11 and allowing just six hits over 6 1/3 innings as the Eagles blanked the Bulldogs 3-0 at Carrow Field.
Click here for the archived broadcast!
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t have scored without that stuff,” Hartland coach Brad Guenther said. “But we got those runners in those situations, and they flinched first.”
“Flinched” might be too strong a word, but the Eagles certainly made the most of their opportunities.
“We play with a chip on our shoulder,” Grundman said. “We’re just trying to score any way we can put pressure on them.”
Hartland ramped up the pressure in the third inning.
Sam Clay led off the inning with a double, stole third, then was waved home when Brighton starter Easton Storey was called for a balk.
“I don’t know what happened,” Storey said. “I’m not sure what I’m doing, (The umpire) said I didn’t come to a stop in my windup. I’ve got to work on that.”
Storey (1-3) had his best outing of the season, allowing just three hits over six innings.
But miscues came back to haunt Storey in the top of the fifth.
Clay reached on an error with one out, then moved to second on a single by Mike Zielinski. Grundman was intentionally walked to load the bases.
But Clay scored on a wild pitch, and a few minutes later, so did Zielinski, and that proved Brighton’s undoing.
“(Storey) did a really good job not giving us anything free,” Guenther said. “So we had to kind of earn it. Our guys really bore down in those situations, and that’s baseball. I always tell the kids it’s an execution sport, and a lot of times it’s in those moments where you find out who can minimize or get out of a jam and who can kind of punish the other team. A lot of times that determines who comes out on top.”
“Their pitcher threw strikes and kept us off balance,” said Brighton coach Charlie Christner, whose team fell to 14-7 overall, 3-5 in the KLAA West. “We had some pretty good swings, but when we did, (Grundman) was able to come back and make pitches, and he made a lot of good pitches. Easton did, too. He gave us a chance to win, but we were a couple of runs short.”
For Hartland (9-4, 4-2), the win kept their fading division title hopes alive, but the Eagles are already looking toward being ready for the state tournament in a little over a month.
“We’re in the process of finding our best baseball,” Guenther said. “We’re still working on finding our groove and, every day, hopefully getting a little bit better. Once they see the results, they can breathe a little bit and stop pressing. We want to be playing our best baseball at the end of the year, for sure.”
