VIEWS: Bulldogs not themselves in supersectional loss

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LOVES PARK – Good thing there wasn’t much room left in the Batavia baseball team’s scrapbooks after a sensational, 30-win season.

There weren’t many new memories worth adding from Monday’s 10-1 loss to Cary-Grove in an IHSA Class 4A Rockford Supersectional, a game in which the Bulldogs didn’t do justice to the team they have become.

“I can clearly say that they’re the better team but we would have liked to have shown better,” Batavia coach Matt Holm said.

Even the most ardent Batavia-backer would have to admit there wasn’t a ton of battle in the Battlin’ Bulldogs on this day. Catcher Ryan Welter owned up to “kind of a shell-shocked feeling” after the Bulldogs fell behind big in the middle innings.

“When you get down to a good team late in the game you know it’s going to be a task to come back and get it,” Welter said. “Obviously we couldn’t get that done today.”

Turns out securing win No. 31 was a devil of an assignment against a Trojans team that demonstrated near-flawless baseball.

Cary-Grove played as if it still will incensed by that classic Batavia football win against the Trojans in 2006, when a two-point conversion in the final seconds propelled the Bulldogs to a one-point win in the state quarterfinals.

The Trojans were dynamite – from a deftly executed outfield relay to gun down a Batavia runner at the plate to a pair of superb bunts to a variety of balls hit on the screws, accounting for 14 hits to Batavia’s six.

“We’ve been the beneficiary of that a couple times this year where things just start going right, and you just step back and let it happen because it all goes the way you need it to,” Holm said. “That certainly happened for them.”

There was some second-guessing material for Bulldogs fans. Electing to start Adam Karger on three days’ rest didn’t pan out well. Holm’s decision to wave Karger home with the Bulldogs trailing 5-0 in the bottom of the fifth also backfired.

But no one ingredient can be taken too seriously when a team loses by nine runs.

One baseball game often produces a skewed picture of where two teams stand, and that was the case here. Two excellent teams took the field. One looked the part, the other far from it.

Most of the postgame sting the Bulldogs felt dealt with the loss of a decorated senior class, featuring several guys who were pillars of the program for multiple seasons.

It’ll be a while before Batavia assembles a middle of the order as imposing as Tim Drish, Brian Krolikowski and Jordan Coffey.

“It was just a great, great class,” said Welter, one of eight senior starters. “I love all of them. They all played their [butts] off every day.”

With much of the same core as last season’s team, the Bulldogs reinvented themselves from a group that probably underachieved into one of the state’s elite teams.

“They became selfless,” Holm said. “Once they did, things were quite a bit different for the Bulldogs.”
A progression worth celebrating, even if the evidence vanished at an inopportune time.

• Jay Schwab is sports editor of The Chronicle. He can be reached at 630-845-5382 or jschwab@kcchronicle.com.