Wapakoneta and Minster pick up wins

MINSTER - The Wapakoneta Redskins used a great pitching performance and timely offense to defeat the New Bremen Cardinals 9-0 on Tuesday night in round two of the Auglaize County ACME sectional at Hanover Street Park.

In the opening game, the Minster Wildcats received a forfeit win over the Waynesfield-Goshen Tigers. With the forfeiture, Waynesfield also forfeits its elimination bracket contest as well and is eliminated from the tournament.

With Tuesday night's results, the number-one seeded Redskins move to the winner's bracket final on Thursday night at 6 p.m. New Bremen also will play on Thursday night at 8 p.m. in an elimination game.

On Wednesday, Minster will play a winner's bracket semifinal at 6 p.m. against the number-two seeded New Knoxville Rangers. The loser of the 6 p.m. game will come back and play the St. Marys Roughriders in an elimination game at 8 p.m.

After all the problems that the pitchers had in Monday night's action, the crowd at Hanover Street Park was treated to a fine pitching performance by the Redskins' Caleb Coil.

Coil was masterful as he allowed just two hits, walking two, striking out seven in pitching the complete game shutout.

"Caleb Coil pitched seven shutout innings, allowing two hits, seven strikeouts and got stronger as the game went on," said Wapakoneta coach Willie Sammentinger. "He threw 93 pitches for the game and got stronger as the game went on. We coaches had a meeting before the game and we decided to go with Caleb so that we had number one and number two ready for the rest of the tournament and it worked out for us and I am proud of the kids.

"The key to Coil's success was that he was able to throw his curveball for strikes," Sammentinger continued. "If he can throw his curveball for strikes, he is deadly. He has a 12-15 mile an hour change between his fastball and his curveball and it just screws hitters into the ground. It is fun to watch somebody that can master a change of speeds like that."

New Bremen coach Mark Keller was equally as impressed with Coil.

"I thought their pitcher was struggling getting his curveball over, his fastball was juicing across the plate. So I told the kids to sit on the fastball and then he started to get the curveball over and I knew it was trouble. He just threw a heck of a game," said Keller.

While Coil was in command, for the second night in a row, the New Bremen pitching staff struggled. A trio of Cardinal pitchers allowed six hits, nine runs, walked 12 batters and threw four wild pitches.

The Redskins got all the offense they needed in the first inning off of New Bremen starter Calib Cox as they scored a pair of runs. Greg Stoll led off with an infield hit, and after Coil flew out, Cox walked Mickey Grothouse, Justin Krebs and Josh Vorhees to make the score 1-0. Keller came out and replaced Cox with Kyle Evers who promptly walked Cale Tabler for the second run of the inning.

Wapak blew the game open in the fourth inning, scoring six times on just three hits. New Bremen pitchers walked five batters in the fourth and Dustin Gerlach drove in two runs with a triple while Tabler drove in two more with a single.