Choice words from coach light fire under Pittsfield baseball team in 18-7 victory over Liberty

LIBERTY, Ill. — After the bottom of the first inning in which the Pittsfield baseball team gave up four runs and fell behind Liberty 4-2, Saukees coach Zach Ferguson gathered his team in front of their third-base dugout.

Ferguson did not disclose exactly what he said to his troops. Rather, he gave the PG version.

“We’ll keep that between us, but it was basically we just needed to start getting a little more serious, take advantage of our opportunities and start playing with a little more intensity,” Ferguson said.

The Saukees responded adequately. Pittsfield scored the game’s next eight runs and finished the game by scoring the final eight runs to pull away to an 18-7 victory.

“We faced a little bit of adversity there, but we beared down and made it happen,” Saukees senior catcher Luke Saxe said. “That’s all you’ve got to do.”

Ferguson admitted the final week of the regular season — with school letting out soon and postseason matchups already set — is one of the most challenging for a coach. Teams can gain momentum during that week if they attack it in the correct manner.

“This is the hard part of the year, especially when other schools are starting to get out and they know that, then here we are still going to school and playing every day,” Ferguson said. “If it was just baseball practice, I think it would be different, but they have to go sit in a classroom all day. They’re a good group, but they’re just typical teenage boys.

“You kind of have to wrangle them around a little bit. Sometimes they’re going to make mistakes, but you coach them up and give them an opportunity to correct those mistakes, and generally, they’re not going to disappoint you.”

The Saukees did not disappoint on Tuesday. They rattled out 13 hits and took advantage of nine walks and seven errors by the Eagles.

“That’s what we need to do all the time, every game,” senior center fielder Lane Foster said. “You have to take advantage of what they give you.”

Saxe legged out a two-out RBI triple in the second to get the Saukees within a run, and Foster gave the Saukees a 5-4 lead with an opposite field single in the third. The Saukees added two more runs in the fourth and three in the fifth. 

The Eagles answered with three runs of their own in the bottom of the fifth and had the potential tying run in the on-deck circle, but Brody Tomhave struck out Dylan Hocking to end the inning.

The Saukees responded once again in the sixth. The first six batters of the inning reached base and 10 batters came to the plate in a five-run inning that featured just three hits. One of those hits was Carter Frazier’s double with no outs that extended the Saukees’ advantage to 12-7. Frazier went 2 for 2 and reached base four times, scoring each time he was on base.

Frazier said an adjustment to his batting stance has served him well in recent games.

“I moved my hands higher, and I took out the step, so I’m just loading my hands and that’s really it,” Frazier said. “I feel like I was late on anything with velocity, like what we saw today. It helps me get to the ball faster.”

Frazier reached base again in the seventh when he was hit by a pitch, and he later scored when Bobby Harris singled and the ball got through left fielder Blaine Deege’s legs and rolled to the fence, the final of Liberty’s seven errors.

“Today was not a day where we played clean baseball whatsoever from start to finish,” Liberty coach Travis Ruppel said. “We had seven errors, and I don’t even think it was seven errors. It was probably about 15. That’s mental, physical, overall just not good baseball. Mentally, it was a game where we should have come in looking to fight, and we just didn’t have that today.”

Pittsfield (18-7) will have a chance to reach 20 victories if it wins each of its two remaining regular season games. That would be an accomplishment Saxe, who has been a part of a 20-victory team each of his first three seasons at Pittsfield, would be proud of.

“That’s always a goal,” Saxe said. “It’d be cool to say that we got 20 wins all four years. That’s a great goal for any high school baseball team.”

The Saukees’ response to a challenge from their coach has put them in position to reach that goal.

“It would mean a lot,” Foster said. “I think we can do it.”

Liberty (13-10) will play host Pleasant Hill/Western on Wednesday before its regular season finale at West Hancock on Thursday.