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EDWARDSVILLE – Edwardsville American Legion Post 199 kept battling from behind throughout the entire game and found a way to come out on top the finish in their Illinois District 22 playoff game against Valmeyer Post 901 at Hoppe Park Tuesday night.
“They didn’t play their best game defensively,” Schaake said. “They made a lot of mistakes and had a couple of baserunning miscues that cost us a little bit, but they (Valmeyer) came on strong and kept battling – the seventh inning, that was huge; we threw the ball away and scored the go-ahead run, but the same guy (Konnar Loewen) that had that happen to him came up and got the key hit to keep going and he’s also the one who scores (the tying run) run on a short single to center field.”
Loewen and Tate Wargo scored the winning runs in the bottom of the seventh thanks to a Joel Quirin single as Post 199 eliminated Valmeyer – who had lost the night before to Alton – by a 6-5 score and advanced to a game against Alton Post 126 at 7:30 p.m. tonight at Hoppe Park. The winner will move into the championship round Thursday evening with a trip to next week’s Illinois Fifth Division tournament in Aviston at stake. Alton got past Belleville 2-1 at Alton High’s Redbird Field Tuesday evening to advance to tonight’s game in the double-elimination tournament.
Edwardsville improved to 24-5 on the summer with the win; Valmeyer was eliminated at 13-12 for the summer.
“We had a great effort by Jared Engeman coming in the fifth inning (to pitch for Zach Seavers, who got the ball to start the game) and pitching the last three innings,” Schaake said. “Seavers didn’t have his best stuff tonight, but he competed. The first inning, they had the bases loaded and nobody out and (Seavers) got out of it with no runs scored.
“We gave them a couple of runs on some errors that we made, but the kids competed well; they battled hard, a very good effort by the whole team.”
Edwardsville did have to dodge a huge bullet in the top of the first when Valmeyer managed to load the bases with one out, but Seavers managed to get out of it thanks to a flyout to center and a grounder to first to get out of the jam, but Valmeyer put up three runs in the top of the second to grab the lead; Edwardsville countered with a run in the bottom of the inning when Andrew Yancik lifted a sacrifice fly to center to score Chase Gockel and cut the lead to 3-1.
Valmeyer added another run in the fourth to go ahead 4-1, but an RBI single by Will Messer (to score Quirin) and an RBI triple from Yancik (that scored Messer) pulled Edwardsville to 4-3; Quirin came up big in the fifth when he drove home Loewen to tie the game at 4-4.
A miscue by Edwardsville allowed Valmeyer to take a 5-4 lead in the top of the seventh, but Loewen got things going in the seventh with a one-out single before he stole second; Wargo then drew a walk and Mikey Hampton reached on an error to load the bases with Quirin coming up.
Quirin then got a pitch to his liking and stroked the game-winning single to right-center to send Post 199 to Wednesday’s winner’s bracket game against Alton. Highland was scheduled to play New Athens in an elimination game Tuesday, but the result was not available; the Highland-New Athens winner will meet Belleville in an elimination game this evening.
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Feeney, 56, is a native of Granite City and graduated from Granite City South in 1978. He was a part-time writer for the old Granite City Journal from 1979-84 before attending Eastern Illinois University in Charleston,
from which he earned his BA in journalism in 1988. He has worked for newspapers in Sikeston, Mo., Rocky Mount, N.C., Seneca, S.C. and in Charleston-Mattoon. He also worked for the old St. Clair County Suburban
Journals.
