Baseball falls to Washburn Rural at regionals to end rollercoaster season

He wasn’t the only of his teammates in a similar situation: fellow senior Darien Stokes suffered what was expected to be a season-ending injury on May 10 when he collided with senior Brett Fields in the outfield. Stokes was used as a courtesy runner in the win over Olathe North, but his abilities were limited to such.

“I did as much as I could in the situation, but it sucks,” Stokes said. “It’s hard to watch it happen and not be able to do anything to help it.”

The Indians would have undoubtedly liked to have Holen and Stokes producing the way they did prior to their injuries, naturally. But in the case of Thursday night, perhaps the team would have most appreciated their bats, because Manhattan struggled to get anything going against Washburn Rural’s Zachary Ebert on the mound.

The junior didn’t allow a Manhattan hit until the fourth inning, when junior Chance Henderson lined one into the outfield. The Indians found themselves threatening when Chapman walked and a balk advanced Henderson and Chapman each a base. But freshman Zac Cox popped out to the first baseman, ending the threat.

But that wasn’t the only time Cox came up empty with a chance to prolong his team’s season.

The other arrived in the second inning, when junior Ed Scott reached second on an error. Chapman walked after him, and a balk sent Scott to third and Chapman to second. Sophomore Jalin Harper walked, loading the bases with two outs for Cox.

But Cox flew out to right field to showers of groans from the Manhattan side of the crowd, as it knew its team’s chances were limited if hits were going to be sparse in amount. And they were.

The other problem for Manhattan was its pitching also struggled.

It didn’t begin that way, however — junior Jake Steinbring got the nod and entered the fourth inning having allowed just one run, a balk that forced in a run in the first inning. He was in a groove. But the fourth inning proved to be the downfall for both the Indians and their season.

The nightmare scenario for MHS began when Steinbring plunked Rural’s Reid Browning to lead off the inning, which led to two groundouts, but that’s when the snowball began its descent down the mountain. Chapman came in in relief, but Cody Ladson reached on a dropped third strike, and a single, two walks and two wild pitches later, Rural grabbed a commanding 5-0 lead. The fourth ended in a 6-0 Rural advantage.

Head coach Don Hess acknowledged that in several games, before Thursday night, his team has seen many a similar inning, when the sloppy plays begin to accumulate.

“We made the pitching change, and all of the sudden, we weren’t picking the ball up and making clean plays,” Hess said. “It’s been kind of how we’ve handled some situations this year, where it starts to snowball, and we aren’t able to stop it.”

The inning was the only one of its kind against Rural, but it was enough to bury Manhattan. Fields roped a two-RBI single in the sixth, trimming the deficit to two, but the damage was done. The Indians had missed too many opportunities at the plate to secure a coveted spot at state.

In Cox’s case, Hess attributed the struggles — to a certain extent — to his inexperience as a freshman.

“Some of that is about being a freshman,” Hess said. “When you’re a freshman, the game is moving kind of fast.”

Cox and his sophomore, junior and senior teammates alike, however, will share in the agony that was Thursday night, knowing the team they swept a month ago had just denied them a spot in Lawrence.

The agony will linger, naturally, but hours before the loss, such emotions were nowhere to be found. That’s because the Indians were fresh off a 5-1 defeat of Olathe North in the regional semifinal, a game that was nearly a polar opposite of the Rural loss.

That includes nearly every facet of the contest: pitching and hitting alike. Junior Nick Wohler started the tilt on the mound and went the distance, striking out only three, letting his defense work behind him and allowing just the one run.

“I worked my fastball in and out; located it pretty well,” Wohler said. “[The defense] made plays on the ground, and Grant [Munsen] at first was big; those last couple plays [helped].”

And instead of starting off in a hole after the first frame, like Manhattan did against Rural, it jumped on the Eagles. The Indians cashed in two runs in the first, when Fields scored on a wild pitch and Woborny walked in.

In both cases, Hess said the first-inning outcome set the tone for the rest of each game.

“In these games, if you can score early, it takes a lot of pressure off,” he said of his team’s quick start to its win over Olathe North. “For us that was huge.”

But as it happened, the first inning was what set the stage for what turned into an even bigger lead for the Junior Blues, one that put the nail in the coffin of Manhattan’s 2016 campaign.

“Those are hard to overcome in crucial games,” Hess said of the run Rural scored in the first frame. “Not only did they score first, but they scored without having to really do much to get there. And that’s disappointing, and that’s always a challenge.”

Either way, Manhattan’s season ends at 12-10 overall, after a year filled with doubleheaders similar to the events of Thursday night: one solid win, and one discouraging loss. Hess said the 1-1 takeaway from regionals Thursday, in some ways, represented the season as a whole.

“You can’t brand a whole season like that, but we have had three or four games, definitely, where we haven’t made them earn the runs they’ve gotten,” he said. “Tonight was just another example of that.”

So the Indians have laid rest to a season jampacked with ups and downs, from Holen going down with his injury to sweeping then-undefeated Washburn Rural in April. But as one of the team’s captains for 2016, Stokes hopes the underclassmen will take away something bigger than the game that holds a permanent habitat in their hearts.

“You know, I hope what they learn from us is that life is bigger than baseball,” Stokes said. “Go out; have a positive attitude every day…. But yeah, life’s bigger than baseball.”