By Rich Bevensee
It was a frustrating top half of the first inning for the Locked In Baseball Expos, who spotted Diamond Jacks Gold five runs despite yielding just one base hit.
Expos coach John Hornung gathered his players outside the dugout and reminded them of a couple simple things, obvious pointers that still needed to be said.
“Okay, everybody breathe,” Hornung said. “I know for sure you can’t hit a five-run home run, and I’m pretty sure we’ve scored five runs in a game before.”
Hornung was right. The Expos earned the top seed for the championship game of the 16U Slugfest by scoring 25 runs in three pool play games.
As a veteran baseball man who played his college ball at Pace, Hornung knew that younger players needed to be reminded, and reassured.
Tyler Jacobs heard the message and put the Expos on his back. The Chatham sophomore got the Expos on the board with a two-run single, and then cracked a three-run double to give them a 10-7, five-inning victory in the Slugfest final on Sunday evening at Diamond Nation in Flemington.
The lefty-hitting Jacobs, who went hitless in his first two games, went 4-for-4 with six RBI in his final two and was named the tournament MVP.
“I’m really excited about being the MVP but I gotta’ thank my teammates who really helped me out,” Jacobs said. “After being down by five in the first inning, we brought the energy and we all showed up. You get up to bat when you’re down by five and all that’s going through your head is you want to be the hero. But at the end of the day you get a single and keep pushing along, inning by inning.”
Credit also goes to tall righty Aiden Nugent, who calmed the Expos by blanking the Diamond Jacks over his final three innings. Nugent, a 6-1, 180-pound Seton Hall Prep sophomore, allowed two runs on four hits over his 4⅔ innings of work. He walked three, hit one batter and struck out two.
“Once we started scoring more runs and getting back into the game, I had more confidence when I went back out to the mound, and I used that to get out of the innings,” Nugent said.
Tyler Jacobs of the Locked In Baseball Expos is the 16U Slugfest MVP.
The Expos retaliated quickly after giving up that five-spot in the top of the first inning. Logan Costello reached on an error and Anthony Palumbit walked to lead off the inning. With two out, Jacobs drove in both runners by dropping a single into center.
The Diamond Jacks tacked on two more runs in their next at bat when Blake McCagg rapped an RBI double and Jake Masterton looped a run-scoring single inside the right field line for a 7-2 lead.
“Sometimes you go down and it’s very easy to take yourself out of a game,” Hornung said. “It’s a long game, right? Once the mood drops it’s very easy to get out of it. It’s also easy to do too much. It’s easy to try and hit the big home run when in reality we just need hits. They got that concept tonight.”
In the bottom of the second, the Expos sent 12 batters to the plate and exploded for eight runs on two hits, five walks and two hit batters.
Much of the damage was due to shaky Diamond Jacks pitching, which the Expos were only too happy to take advantage of. After the Expos pushed five runs across without the benefit of a batted ball to tie the game, Jacobs came up with the bases loaded. He crushed an outside pitch into the right-center gap to clear the bases and finish with a stand-up double which gave the Expos a 10-7 lead.
“I felt amazing tonight,” Jacobs said. “I put a lot of work in last night in the batting cage, hitting off the tee and doing flips with my dad. I wasn’t hitting the outside pitch very well yesterday (Saturday), so I focused on the outside. I got the outside pitch today and put it into the gap.”
The Expos finished with three hits, and Jacobs had two of them.
“It was difficult to pick an MVP because it was such a complete team effort the rest of the tournament,” Hornung said. “Every single person contributed in some way and we could have picked multiple guys. But to show up in the championship game when everything’s on the line, when we were down, when we needed the big hit, Tyler was the guy with five RBI and gave us a shot in the arm.”
Masterton was effective in his two innings of relief work for the Diamond Jacks. He pitched two scoreless frames, didn’t allow a hit, surrendered one walk and struck out three.
Payton Keller had an RBI single for the Diamond Jacks and Nico Moore and Owen Keough each added a run-scoring sacrifice fly.