The St. Thomas baseball team rolled top-seeded Bethel University 9-1 in the opening round of the MIAC playoffs Friday afternoon at Legends Park in Minnetonka.
The Tommies (23-14-1 overall, 11-7 MIAC), who came into the match winning three out of their last four games, managed to get their first win against the Royals (30-8 overall, 15-3 MIAC) this season. The game started in Bethel’s favor when designated hitter Luke Anderson pounded a hanging curveball over the left field fence in the second inning off St. Thomas starter Eric Veglahn.
“(I) pretty much knew it from the second it left my hand. It was right down the middle and (Anderson) got a good piece of it,” Veglahn said.
Veglahn wasn’t discouraged though, as he managed to only allow one more hit in eight innings of work. Veglahn managed to strike out four in the process and said the key to his dominance was his fastball.
“I think early on it was just my fastball and mostly command,” Veghlan said. “I was just dialed in the whole game and being able to locate my fastball, that’s the biggest part of my game.”
“(Veglahn) just put the ball where he wanted to. He stayed out of the middle of the plate, short of the one hanger he threw to (Anderson). He really only had about two bad pitches the entire game,” coach Chris Olean said.
The game remained at a standstill until the Tommies exploded in the seventh inning. Shortstop Zach Gottfredsen started the inning off for St. Thomas with a single to right field. Following the single, Olean wanted to play small-ball and had third baseman Ben Carpenter lay down the sacrifice bunt. After a Bethel error, centerfielder Jimmy Dolan drove in the go-ahead run to put the Tommies on top 2-1. And they didn’t stop there.
After a double, a walk and a single, first baseman Dan Ziemann entered the batter’s box with the bases loaded. Ziemann crushed a grand slam to center field to give the Tommies a commanding lead late in the game.
“I figured they’d try to get ahead … (Bethel pitcher Joe Zorn) threw me a fastball away to get strike one, so I figured he’d probably try to come back in, same little two-seamer, just to try to get me to roll over something so they could get two and get out of it,” Ziemann said. “And (Zorn) just kind of left it out over the plate, I put a good swing on it and it went a long ways.”
“(Zorn) is damn good. He’s a really, really good pitcher, good competitor, and I think we just wore him down a little bit,” Olean said. “Our first two times through the order were pretty poor in terms of what we were trying to do, and by the third time we finally started to have a better approach and figure it out a little bit.”
Despite knocking off the top-seeded Royals, Olean didn’t want to get too far ahead of himself because of the inconsistency this season.
“Well I’d like to say a lot, but our team has been not really consistent so far. We’d like to think we hopefully show up and play a good game tomorrow again. We certainly know what we can do, we’ve shown that we can beat anybody and lose to anybody,” Olean said.
St. Thomas will play the winner between Concordia-Moorhead and St. John’s at 2 p.m. Saturday.
Jordan Kruger can be reached at krug6172@stthomas.edu.