Baseball splits with JC amid senior catcher Holen’s season-ending injury

Greg Woods, Editor-in-Chief

Brett Fields tattooed the first pitch he saw Tuesday evening in Junction City to right-center field for a long single.

The last one the senior saw landed in JC’s Christien Ozores’ glove in center field for an out.

Between those pitches, a lot happened. A lot changed. Most notably, though, Fields and the Manhattan High baseball team split with Junction City in two run-rule decisions, the first of which started with Fields’ single and went the Indians’ way, 14-4, while the second did not, 13-3.

The contrast in outcomes was striking to most, head coach Don Hess included. But what also stood out in most evident fashion was the third inning of game one, when the Indians’ senior captain and catcher keeled over in pain. A foul tip from the Bluejays’ Thane McDaniel caught the free hand of Tanner Holen behind the plate, a flash of McDaniel’s bat that sent Holen wincing and kneeling over.

Holen was driven back to Manhattan for surgery soon after being removed from the game.

The Iowa Western commit’s season came to a screeching halt in an instant, but fortunately for him, the Indians didn’t need his bat in the game.

That’s because Manhattan walloped 19 hits in said game en route to a speedy five-inning affair. Fields went a spotless 4-for-4 with two RBI, while junior Chance Henderson’s 4-for-4 game came with five RBI.

It was the second game, one that saw MHS make four errors and a number of wild pitches, that made the Indians’ first-game blowout perplexing at least to Hess.

“I don’t even know where you start. We were so incredibly good the first game, and so incredibly bad the second,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many mental and physical errors and bad pitching maneuvers in one game.”

Junction City started the freshman McDaniel on the mound in game one, while senior Charlie Peyla got the nod for the nightcap and went the distance. Hess, though, pointed to his team’s efficiency at the plate in game one, not the pitcher it faced.

“The freshman, even though he was young, his velocity was good,” Hess said. “Hitting is contagious, and I think we had some guys that just had really good at-bats.”

Perhaps some of the explanation can be found in the Indians’ pitching: in game one, senior Nick Wohler started and hurled 4 ⅔ innings for five strikeouts, while Hess was forced to use the arms of starter Jake Steinbring, senior Grant Munsen and sophomore Jalin Harper in the second.

Munsen was on the mound when the disaster for MHS began. After Steinbring faced the third inning’s first four batters without getting an out, Munsen took the hill, but didn’t fare much better. Junction City tallied three runs via wild pitch in the inning, and as Hess pointed out to his team postgame, the six runs JC plated in the frame all came without a ball escaping the infield.

“We made the comment that we could not have drawn up the inning any worse,” Hess said. “It really was a calamity of errors that inning, but it seemed like we played most of the second game that way.”

He wasn’t wrong: the Indians’ adversity extended into the following inning, when they gave up another four runs on just two hits.

“The thing that’s hard to recover from that is that it was bad baseball. And when you play bad baseball, sometimes it’s hard to recover from that inning-to-inning,” Hess said. “If someone hits a three-run home run, you just go, ‘OK. Now it’s our turn.’ But we just weren’t doing anything defensively to help, and as a result, it snowballed, and we just couldn’t stop it.”

Wohler said Holen’s injury both helped and hurt MHS.

“I feel like the first game, [the injury] helped us, and the second game it hurt us,” Wohler said. “In the first game, we were trying to get that win for him, but the second game we kind of fell flat.”

Manhattan did, in fact, get the win for Holen — and emphatically, at that. After Holen left the game, the Indians posted a gaudy eight runs in the fifth frame, an inning that saw the Indians bat around and connect on eight hits, as well as Henderson belt two RBI doubles.

The split comes ahead of Wednesday’s makeup doubleheader at Highland Park — and Friday’s against Hayden — a back-to-back set of games. And having used five arms against Junction City, Hess is imploring his pitchers to simply throw strikes.

“With us playing six games in four days, our pitching is going to be taxed,” he said. “We’re just going to have to have guys that throw the ball over the plate. First and foremost, we’ve got to have strikes.”

Holen has been an option on the mound, a rare option, but an option indeed. He won’t be one anywhere on the diamond for the rest of his team’s 2016 campaign, forcing junior Brady Woborny to take up the catching duties, but Wohler is confident his team will gain traction Wednesday at Highland Park.

“I think we’re going to get back on track,” Wohler said. “We’ll get the bats going, pitching’s going to get going, and we’ll be ready.”