Arrow pointing up for Freeport baseball as team pushes toward playoffs

By: Jerin Steele
Thursday, April 18, 2024 | 7:21 PM

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Looking back through the results so far this year, Freeport baseball coach Ed Carr felt his team had a chance to win nearly every game it has played.

A mistake or a bounce have led to some getting away, but considering the Yellowjackets haven’t had the services of either of their future NCAA Division I pitchers, Dustin Rape (Penn State) or Michael Hanz (West Virginia), on the mound and have an extremely young lineup, the results have been encouraging.

Now they are getting some reinforcements for the stretch run as Rape has been cleared to pitch. Coming off a sweep of Valley this week, the Yellowjackets have put themselves back in contention for a playoff spot with four section games remaining.

The Yellowjackets are 3-5 in a jumbled-up Section 3-3A that has some teams needing to make up games because of the rainy weather over the last two weeks.

“Sometimes when you have a record under .500, you can see you’re getting completely overmatched, but we’re not,” Carr said. “We just don’t have a ton of room for error. We need to make sure we play really clean and execute when we have runners in scoring position. We need to do a better job of that, but I think we’ve proven what we told the kids, which is that we can beat anybody in the section playing clean baseball.”

Rape was available out of the bullpen in Tuesday’s game against Valley, but did not get in. He’ll make his season debut soon.

They’re hopeful to get Hanz back as well. He has been able to hit but hasn’t pitched.

“Dustin will be on a restricted pitch count coming back from injury, but just having those guys in the bullpen it’s not an exaggeration to say that we could have won five to seven games. It’s been tough at times to navigate with only three arms, but our young guys have really stepped up.”

One of the young guys who has stepped up is sophomore Jeff Coller, who pitched a complete game against Valley on Tuesday. Senior Matt Corfield has also shouldered the load pitching-wise and got the win Monday. Fellow senior Malik Febinger has thrown quality innings as well.

Carr said the sweep of Valley was his team’s most complete series. The Yellowjackets did not make a mistake in the field.

On Monday, Hanz provided the go-ahead run on a sacrifice fly, and Kason Barker had an RBI single to help Freeport win 2-1.

Freshmen came through on offense in the second game. Luke Whitfield drove in two runs, and Robert Schreckengost had an RBI as Freeport won 3-1.

“We’re a young offense, and we’re not going to put up 13 runs a game, but we can draw out good at-bats and get on base a little bit more than we had been doing,” Carr said. “The encouraging thing about the Valley series was our battle.”

Freeport begins a two-game series with Shady Side Academy on Monday and finishes off section play against East Allegheny on May 6-7. It’s hard to predict how many wins will be needed for the Yellowjackets to return to the playoffs because some teams have only had four section games, but they know if they keep winning, they have a good chance to get in.

“The sweep (of Valley) really helps,” Carr said. “I think if we win three of our last four, we have a shot, and obviously if we sweep both, we have a really good shot. We’re just going to try and win that first game against Shady Side Academy (on Monday) and go from there.”

Jerin Steele is a freelance writer

Tags: Freeport