No longer limping, the Mount Vernon baseball team is pushing towards the finish line.
With the resurgent bat of junior Eric Lamb, and the 1-2 pitching punch of junior AJ McDermott and sophomore Cael Foreman, the Mustangs beat West Delaware, 4-2, on Friday, July 12, in a Class 3A substate quarterfinal at Ash Park.
“We are the walking wounded; everyone has something; the coach has a bad knee,” Mount Vernon coach Charles Chatman said. “You’ve just got to get through it, get through the tough parts. I think we did.”
McDermott has been battling an arm injury. He held the Hawks to two runs on one hit over four innings.
“He did everything we asked him,” Foreman said. “Especially coming back from two weeks off.”
But the sophomore was lights out over the final three innings, retiring everybody he faced. That’s nine up, nine down, with seven strikeouts.
“He’s always had a good arm,” Lamb said. “And he especially showed it today.”
“I think it was just adrenaline,” Foreman said. “Everyone throws harder when they are ready to go. They just weren’t catching up to it, so we just stuck with it.”
Offensively, Mount Vernon (19-17) only had two hits all night, both by Lamb, but made them count.
Lamb hammered the ball off the left-center field wall in the first inning, plating Colin Bentley, who had reached on a walk.
Lamb has only been back in the lineup for a few weeks. He had ACL surgery in the winter.
“I worked on my swing every day and I hit every day,” Lamb said. “Today it finally just clicked in my head. I was dialed in and just did my job.”
“Since he was cleared by a doctor in April to hit off a tee, he’s hit off the tee every day,” Chatman said. “For every activity he’s been cleared to do, he’s been pushing it.”
Chatman said it was a massive boost to pencil his name into the lineup again.
“He’s a game-changer,” Chatman said. “He’s a tough matchup for everybody.”
In addition to Lamb’s RBI double, the Mustangs scored a run on a bases-loaded walk by Tait Rentschler and another on a passed ball.
A 3-0 lead against a team they split with in WaMaC play June 27 (losing 9-7 and winning 7-4) – and have faced three years in a row in the postseason opener — was the right kind of momentum.
“It seems like we are always playing these guys,” Foreman said. “Once we had that big first inning, it boosted our confidence.”
West Delaware (11-25) pushed across a run in the third inning and the fourth inning on a ground out and an error.
Up 3-2, the Mustangs added an insurance run in the fifth when Cole Thurn walked, and courtesy runner Toby Neal was bunted home by Garet Swartzendruber.
Now the degree of difficulty ramps up. Mount Vernon was scheduled to take on No. 1 Dubuque Wahlert (31-9) on Monday, July 15, at McAleece Park and Rec Complex in Dubuque. Win that, and they’d play for a trip to state Wednesday, July 17, against either Solon or Clear Creek Amana.
“We’ve worked our butts off to get here,” Lamb said. “It means a lot.”
Mount Vernon closed the regular season with a 4-1 loss to Cedar Rapids Xavier on Tuesday, July 9.
Xavier pitcher Zander Murray, a sophomore, limited the Mustangs to three hits. Mount Vernon countered with a committee of arms, with Landon Wilson taking the loss, giving up six hits and four runs in two innings.
Sophomore Michael Ryan had two hits, including the lone RBI, to lead the offense.
West Delaware 001 100 0 – 2 1 2
Mount Vernon 300 010 x – 4 2 3
Keagan Jackson and Sam Ogden; AJ McDermott, Cael Foreman and Cole Thurn. W – McDermott. L – Jackson. S – Foreman. 2B – Eric Lamb (MV), Macoy Roling (WD).