New Bremen wins big at Versailles

VERSAILLES -The New Bremen Cardinals stayed alive in the Midwest Athletic Conference softball race Monday night as they went on the road and came home with a huge 10-0 win over the Versailles Tigers.

With the win, New Bremen improves to 7-4 overall and more importantly improves to 2-1 in the conference and remains just a game behind league-leader Coldwater and a half-game behind Parkway, the conferences lone undefeated teams.

The loss, their second in a row, all but eliminates the Tigers from the conference title chase as they fall to 8-4 overall and 2-2 in the MAC.

After being no-hit on Thursday at Celina, the New Bremen offense exploded for 10 runs and 13 hits, including four doubles and three home runs. In all, eight of the nine starters had at least one hit, eight different players scored at least one run and six drove in at least a run.

Tilor Rohr led the Cardinals with a double and home run among her four hits while driving in four runs.

What pleased veteran New Bremen boss Craig Griesdorn most was the fact that seven of the runs came as a result of two-out hits.

"Two-out hits were big for us tonight, we figured that seven of the 10 runs came with two outs," said Griesdorn. "We were able to execute, we were able to get some bunts down and that's what we expect of them, to come up with clutch hits.

"This was a quality win for us. Versailles is an excellent team and we knew they would hit the ball. Last year we had a six runs and they came back and beat us, this year we were able to complete the game."

New Bremen took advantage of some shoddy play by Versailles to put three runs on the board in the first two innings. In the first, Sara Rutschilling reached on an error, was sacrificed to second by Kim Thobe and rode home on Elly Cisco's laser shot over the fence in leftfield for a home run to make the score 2-0.

Then, in the second, Steph Winner reached on a one-out error, moved to second on a sacrifice bunt by Kate Wente and scored on a single to right by Michelle Griesdorn.

New Bremen blew the game open scoring three more two-out runs in the third. Thobe doubled with one out and scored on an infield hit by Maria Staton to deep short. After a single by Timmerman, Rohr plated two more runs to make the score 6-0.

The six runs was more than enough run support for Cardinals hurler Maria Staton as she was in command from the get-go, holding the Tigers to just four hits while not walking a batter and striking out eight.

"Maria did a great job of keeping the ball low and keeping them off balance," said Griesdorn. "We were able to take advantage of some of their mistakes and come away with a quality win."

"When you start the game off with an error, we were in trouble from the beginning," said Versailles coach Phil Cavin. "You don't get outs from errors and you don't get outs from walks. New Bremen came here ready to hit the ball because they knew it was going to go somewhere in this wind. We were trying to do the same thing but we just did not play very well.

"We're in the third inning and we are out of our short game because we are behind 6-0," continued Cavin. "We are down to 12 outs and you cannot afford to give up outs when you're trying to come back that from that kind of a hole."

New Bremen is back in action today playing host to Fort Loramie while Versailles is also back on the field today, traveling to Russia.