MTZ baseball makes four last week

By BLAKE FAITH
Staff Writer

The Mt. Zion baseball team lost four games last week. The losses came against St. Joseph, Monticello and Mahomet-Seymour.

Against Monticello, the Braves struck first in the bottom of the first inning. Ethan Hamrick battled out an at-bat and walked. Jackson Beiler came up and got a hit to the right-field gap. Hamrick took off from first and scored on the play to give the Braves a 1-0 lead.

Drew Hittmeier got the start for the Braves and threw three shutout innings to start the game. In the bottom of the third, the Braves struck again. Sam Driscoll got on base with a single to the left-field gap. Kolby Koslofski followed with a hit to the left-field gap.

Beiler then came up and hit the ball hard enough to get on base and bring in a run to give the Braves a 2-0 lead.

Monticello scored a run off a hit by pitch and two-out RBI single. The Sages then scored 10 combined runs over the next two innings to win 11-2.

“Except for that inning where balls just kept continuing to drop. I thought the first few innings we did a good job early and counts of being aggressive at the plate,” Head coach J.D. Arnold said. “I thought Drew did a good job on the mound for the first five innings. We just didn’t capitalize on a couple opportunities there in the fourth and the fifth inning and that kind of came back and bit us.”

The Braves fall to 8-16 overall and 4-8 in Apollo conference play. The Braves finish off their regular season against Centennial at home and at the Centennial tournament this week.

“We need to start playing better baseball,” Coach Arnold said. “If we played better baseball, we’re in a lot more games and we give ourselves a chance to win a game and we played good baseball for about five innings there and then the wheels fell off. We just want to try to continue to play good baseball and we’re in a kind of tough part of our schedule and we’ve been in a tough part of our schedule. There are no breaks on our schedule from here on out. So hopefully we can start playing better baseball.”