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Fort Recovery's Alex Dues winds up in the first inning against St. Henry on Tuesday.
FORT RECOVERY - St. Henry's Evan Bowers held Fort Recovery to four baserunners and no runs in its final five turns at-bat.
But the two runs he allowed in the first inning held up for the Indians.
Caden Homan hit a two-run double, Rex Leverette took away a potential game-tying hit in right field, and Alex Dues shut out the Redskins for a 2-0 win in a Midwest Athletic Conference baseball game at the LeFevre Baseball/Softball Complex on Tuesday.
"Good win against a good team," Fort Recovery coach Kevin Eyink said. "We kind ofneeded that confidence boost. We've been struggling a little bit, and we played a nice clean game, had no errors - I don't know if we've had a game like that so far."
It took Bowers a few batters to settle in, and that allowed Fort Recovery (5-5. 2-2 MAC) to take an early lead. Reece Wendel led off with a drive down the left field line that looked like a double, only for Drew Bergman to make a strong throw to the infield that held him at first.
That kept Alex Gaerke from driving him in when he hit a fly ball to the left field fence on one hop, which put runners on second and third for Homan. Homan lashed a double over the head of a leaping Bergman as Wendel and Gaerke scored.
"Felt like they were just sitting back and waiting for that fastball, and they hit them well," St. Henry coach Mike Gast said. "But after that, I felt like there wasn't a significant amount of hard contact."
Bowers set the next three batters down in order, aided by a running catch in the gap by Hayden Boeckman, to stop the bleeding. He retired five more before a runner reached on an error in the third, then pitched a 1-2-3 fourth and worked around a two-out walk in the fifth.
St. Henry third baseman Owen Zimmerman fields a ground ball in the second inning.
Fort Recovery's best chance to add on came in the sixth, when Gavin Faller singled and Riggs Tobe worked a two-out walk before Bowers got a pop-up to end the inning.
"After that first inning, he started to mix it up a little bit," Gast said. "He was throwing more off-speed and was effective throwing off-speed in the zone."
But Dues didn't need any more help.
St. Henry (6-7, 3-1 MAC) had chances at the plate, starting with Boeckman's single in the first. Dues stranded him at second, but gave up a one-out double to Logan Dehan in the second.
Dehan took off for third on a pitch in the dirt, but Tobe made a throw from his knees to beat him by several steps.
"We try to preach aggression on a dirt ball," Gast said. "We just didn't get a great read on that dirt ball. But I don't fault our kids for trying to be aggressive on the bases, which we want to do. We just didn't get a great jump."
The Redskins' best chance came in the fifth, when Dehan and Jacob Schwieterman led off with singles and moved up on a wild pitch. Dues got Brody Schwartz to swing through a fastball for the second out, but walked Carter LaGuire to load the bases.
Boeckman slammed a line drive deep into the right-center gap, but Leverette got a good jump and caught it over his shoulder running back to the wall.
"That would've cleared the bases for us, gotten three runs," Gast said. "They made some really nice plays."
Fort Recovery right fielder Rex Leverette chases down Hayden Boeckman's fly ball in the fifth inning.
Leverette has been splitting time with Reece Evers and Mason Diller, starting four of the Indians' 10 games in right field while Evers and Diller have started three each. Leverette also appeared at catcher in one game.
It was his first time manning right field since April 13.
"Kind of going with who's hot, who's hitting the ball well," Eyink said.
Dues pitched around a one-out walk in the sixth and set St. Henry down in order in the seventh, finishing with a four-pitch strikeout of Schwartz.
With his curveball flustering the Redskins despite steady rain, he tallied 10 strikeouts and scattered five hits and three walks in the complete-game win.
"It's the first night he's had his curveball really working, and you can tell the difference," Eyink said. "They struggled. He had them guessing, they were off-balance."
Dehan and Jacob Schwieterman had two hits apiece.
With the win, Fort Recovery stopped St. Henry's three-game winning streak and its own three-game skid heading into a visit from MAC co-leader Minster on Thursday.
"Just the confidence," Eyink said of what he wanted his team to take from the win. "Just go play. We're good enough, we've got the skills, just go play, be confident, and things will be clean and we won't make the mistakes we've been making."
St. Henry, now a game back of the MAC lead, will look to bounce back Thursday with a trip to Delphos to play St. John's.
