Indian Creek’s Jagger Bray fields a ground ball to second during Tuesday’s county tournament game against Greenwood Christian.
Rob Baker | For the Daily Journal
Tuesday’s Johnson County tournament opener against Greenwood Christian wound up taking about 45 minutes longer than Indian Creek coach Steve Mirizzi would have liked. But at least the end result is one he and his team can live with.
The Braves let a seventh-inning lead slip away before regrouping in the ninth for a 4-3 triumph over a scrappy young group of Cougars.
Indian Creek (3-1) will face Franklin in a Saturday afternoon semifinal at Center Grove.
“I’m just proud of our guys for scrapping there at the end and finding a way, because we’ve been kind of struggling offensively,” Mirizzi said. “We’ve still got to clean some things up in the field, because that kind of cost us.”
Arjun Lothe led off the top of the ninth with a base hit off GCA reliever Eli Ellis and then stole second. Freshman Malachi Mink then laid down a great bunt in front of home plate to move Lothe over; the throw to first pulled the fielder off the bag and also allowed Lothe to come all the way around to score.
Lothe, who earned the pitching win with 2 1/3 innings of relief, worked around a one-out single to put the Cougars away in the bottom of the inning.
The game got into extras in the first place thanks to an impressive late-inning rally by the Cougars (1-3).
Down 3-0 and struggling to get anything going against Braves starter Nolan Ankney, GCA finally got on the board with an unearned run in the sixth. Consecutive two-out singles by Ellis and Colton Flint scored Charlie Overton, who had previously reached on an error. With the go-ahead run at the plate, however, Ankney came up with his 11th strikeout to end the threat.
The sophomore southpaw wasn’t as fortunate in the seventh. A one-out error put a runner on for Caden Camden, who singled to put the tying run on with two out. Overton greeted new hurler Lothe with an RBI single to make it 3-2, and with runners on second and third, Trey Harney delivered a game-tying infield hit. The Cougars stranded the potential winning run at third when Lothe got Ellis to fly out to center field.
“We needed that ball to drop,” GCA coach Doug Hagist said.
Ankney had been in cruise control for much of the evening, calmly working his way out of anything resembling a jam early. He gave up a leadoff double to Ellis in the second inning but stranded him there, striking out the next three hitters; then, when the first two GCA hitters in the third reached on errors, Ankney escaped with a groundout, strikeout and flyout.
He exited having struck out 12 hitters without a walk, scattering four hits.
Cougars starter Trey Harney looked similarly strong through the first three innings, yielding just one infield hit and striking out five, but he started having control troubles in the fourth and the Braves took advantage. Sam Boyd and Jagger Bray started the frame with walks and Gavin Francis was hit by a pitch to load the bases before a one-out walk to Lothe pushed Boyd across with the game’s first run.
In the top of the fifth, Indian Creek chased Harney from the game when Brock Bragg led off with a single and Talan Steinway followed with a walk. Bragg got home on a sacrifice fly by Boyd, and Steinway then scored on Bray’s RBI single off of Overton.
Though the Cougars came up short in the end, Hagist believes the game helped set a tone for the rest of the season.
“Indian Creek’s a good ball team,” he said, “and it tells them that we can play. We can play with whoever we step on the field with — and that’s going to be really important come 1A tournament time. Playing teams like this makes us better; when we can battle them this way and hit some good pitching and see what that’s all about, it just makes us better.”
The Braves, meanwhile, can now turn their attention toward the Grizzly Cubs now that they survived Tuesday’s test.
“Franklin’s a tall task,” Mirizzi said, “but I want us to go in there and see how we match up with them, our best versus their best. I know they’ve got a stacked lineup, so our kids are up for the challenge.”
