It’s still at least the better part of two weeks before the Jackson Bulls play a game at the state Class C amateur baseball tournament.
But whenever the Bulls do take the field in either Dassel, Delano or Litchfield, they should be ready because they’ve been playing some high-intensity games for the past week.
In its latest game, Jackson was a 1-0 winner over Fairmont in Game 2 of a best-of-three series. The Bulls forced a deciding Game 3.
UPDATE: Game 3 was postponed on Sunday and rescheduled for 7:30 p.m. Monday at Herb Wolf Field in Fairmont.
“I told the guys, that’s like playing a state tournament game,” said Jackson Manager Scott Bahr. “Wednesday night was like a state tournament game and Game 2 against Milroy was like a state tournament game. You’re going to see great pitching on both sides and every ball put in play is going to be important because you just don’t know. Every mistake is probably going to be more than you can overcome.”
Through the years, the Bulls have known what to expect when their all-time wins leader, Ryan Rasche, takes the mound. They may have received even a little more on Friday.
“We know when Ryan pitches, he keeps us in the game,” Bahr said. “He keeps us competitive and gives us a chance to win and he was better than that (Friday). He not only kept us in it, but he got some big outs when he needed to on his own and then he got some guys off balance where they put some balls in play, and we could make some plays behind him. We played good defense behind him, but he was in control from the beginning to the end.”
There was a brief rain delay after the end of the first inning. The delay was only about 15 minutes and Rasche was able to return to the mound without any issue.
“What we would have done in that situation would be wait a few minutes and have him go throw in the bullpen, even in the rain and then have him come back in,” Bahr said. “We would have simulated short innings just to keep him loose. I don’t know who it would have helped had it gone on, but it was a pretty short rain delay.”
Rasche went 7 2/3 innings of shutout baseball before Bahr and the Bulls went to the bullpen. He allowed five hits, walked four, hit one batter and struck out 10.
Evan Olesen got the final out of the eighth inning for Jackson, with Will Larson retiring the side in order in the ninth. Larson had been the opener for Jackson in Game 1.
“We were missing a couple of guys on Wednesday, but Fairmont was missing a few guys tonight,” commented Bahr. “That’s how amateur baseball goes. We’ve talked about it for a lot of years. It takes a lot of guys to win a baseball game.
“We had Mason Pohlman come in and only catch for two guys. Some people are going to look at the box score and think ‘well, he only played for two batters’ but those were two really big outs. There was a runner at second base and a runner at third base consecutively and we ended up winning by one run, so those were pretty big outs for him to come in after sitting on the bench and catch those two.
The only run of the game came in the fourth inning in a matchup of former NCAA Division I players.
Olesen singled to lead off the inning. With one out, Olesen advanced on a groundout to shortstop.
Lucas Gardner singled to bring Olesen around with what turned out to be the only run of the game.
Gardner, who played at Gardner-Webb University, got that hit off Fairmont’s Spencer Chirpich, who played at Abilene Christian.
That hit was added to the list of key performances for the Bulls.
“Gardy came through with a big clutch single like that and we score from second,” Bahr said. “We could go on and on. You go back to Wednesday night, and we had to go to the bullpen early on purpose and we go to Landon Vaske. We were hoping to get three or four innings out of him, and he steps up and gives us seven innings.
“It takes 20 guys to go to state and I think we’re proving that. I’m pretty proud of how they’re competing and how they’re battling.”