Center Grove will have to wait about five weeks to officially claim a Johnson County baseball tournament championship, but it did as much of the heavy lifting as it could on Saturday.
The Trojans jumped on top early and didn’t let up, building an 11-1 lead over Franklin before an equally relentless rain halted the title contest after three innings.
The game will be concluded on May 14 before the start of the teams’ scheduled regular-season game at Franklin.
The Trojans struck for three runs in the top of the first inning against Grizzly Cubs starter Pryce Rucker. Drew Culbertson led off with a walk, stole second and came home on an error. Mitchell Evans followed with a double that scored Sam Griffith and then came in to score on a one-out RBI single by Caden Curry.
“Jumping out to a 3-0 lead definitely helped relax everybody,” Center Grove coach Keith Hatfield said.
An opposite-field solo homer by Max Clark got Franklin on the board in the bottom of the frame, but Center Grove just kept coming. A two-out two-run double by Owen Guilfoy sparked what turned into a four-run second, with Zach Ferguson and Curry each driving one in against reliever Noah DeArmitt.
In the third, the Trojans struck for four more runs. Griffith and Evans each had an RBI hit, and both came around to score on a two-run single by Guilfoy.
“I thought our approach at the plate was really, really good,” Hatfield said. “Both of those kids that we saw aren’t overpowering, so you can’t really cheat and get out in front of the fastball. I thought our approach, staying up the middle and trying to let the ball travel a bit was really, really good today.
“And then when they did make mistakes, we took advantage of them, which you have to do against a team with that offensive firepower.”
The Grizzly Cubs’ firepower was largely extinguished on Saturday. Center Grove hurler Ben Murphy, a sophomore making his varsity debut, struck out three and did not allow a hit after the Clark homer.
“We didn’t get off to the start we were hoping for,” Franklin coach Ryan Feyerabend said. “There’s no excuses. They’ve played about as many ball games as we have this week. … It wasn’t the start we wanted, but we’ll get back at it.”
Hatfield said that his team will need to put this game on the back burner for the next month while tending to the other business at hand.
“I think you just kind of forget about it for a little bit,” he said. “It’s five weeks away; it’s over a month away, so you forget about it. The good thing about it is it’s not a semifinal, it’s the championship, so when it does roll around in the middle of May, it’s going to be easy to pick back up for mentally and emotionally.”
