Reliever Ryan Wass shines, Burrell rallies in 6th to defeat rival Freeport

By: Dave Mackall
Wednesday, April 23, 2025 | 9:51 PM

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Ryan Wass has been Burrell baseball’s steady shortstop for two seasons. As a relief pitcher, he’s anything but a pushover.

Wass was superb on the mound Wednesday, giving Burrell an opportunity for a payback victory against Freeport.

Trailing for much of the game, the Buccaneers rallied for three runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to back Wass’ longest pitching stint of his high school career and held on to beat the visiting Yellowjackets, 5-4, for a split of their two-game WPIAL Section 3-3A series.

Freeport banged out 15 hits and won the opener Tuesday at home, 13-5.

“Wins like this are only going to help us down the road,” Burrell coach Jay Miller said. “You just keep competing. You try to make something happen.”

With time running out, the Bucs (7-5, 7-3) finally did so to remain a game behind first-place Mt. Pleasant, which beat Southmoreland, 14-1, for its fifth straight victory.

Burrell waited until the bottom of the sixth to take its first lead and make a winner of Wass, a junior who worked a career-high 4²⁄₃ innings in relief of injured starter Brayden Mell.

“We needed an arm to come in and throw strikes effectively after Mell wasn’t able to get as deep as he wanted to,” Miller said.

It was Mell’s first appearance since being hit by a pitch April 14 against Ligonier Valley.

“He had the thumbnail torn off,” Miller said. “He tried to go today, but as soon as we saw that thing hanging, we had to go to the next guy. (Wass) was the next guy. He did a great job of settling in and pumping strikes.”

After Mell labored through the first 2 1/3 innings, allowing three earned runs, Wass came on and scattered four hits, walked a batter and struck out four.

“I’m usually a one- or two-inning guy,” he said. “I’ve never closed out a game before.”

Wass withstood Freeport’s seventh-inning rally that produced the only run against him after Burrell manufactured three runs in the bottom of the sixth, despite getting just one hit, an RBI single by Trey Coury that gave the Bucs a 5-3 lead.

Burrell took advantage of two Freeport errors, a pair of walks by reliever Luke Logsdon and successful back-to-back bunts by Wass and Ryan Bates in erasing a 3-2 deficit.

“Holy cow,” Miller said. “Small ball works sometimes. That’s the bottom of the lineup, your 8 and 9 guys both getting down bunts, which helped us get the lead going into that last inning. That insurance run (on Coury’s single) was crucial with their 2-3-4 hitters coming up.”

With one out in the top of the seventh, Wass yielded Michael Hanz’s RBI double for Freeport before hitting Kason Barker with a pitch. One out later, Gage Blystone singled, advancing Barker to third.

But Wass closed out the inning and earned his first decision of the season by getting Owen Westendorf to hit into a forceout at second.

“I was amped and nervous as soon as (Blystone) got that hit and they had a runner on third,” Wass said. “My catcher (David Kleckner) came out and calmed me down. We faced (Westendorf) the entire game, so I just trusted my fielders and they made the play.”

Freeport (7-6, 4-4) took a 1-0 lead in the first on Barker’s sacrifice fly that scored Gavin Tola, who singled to center to lead off the game, advanced to second on a wild pitch by Mell and to third on Luke Whitfield’s groundout.

The Yellowjackets tacked on a pair of runs in the third. Mell walked Hanz and Barker, and both scored on Chase Walker’s RBI single that was mishandled by Adam Wass in left field.

Burrell got single runs on Adam Scheftic’s RBI groundout in the fourth and Rayden Shirey’s RBI single in the fifth to close within 3-2.

“They’re a good baseball team, and they’re going to play well at home,” Freeport coach Ed Carr said. “We’ve been hitting the ball very well, but Wass did a really nice job of calming down our bats a little bit. When you’re in a tight game like this, it’s going to come down to a couple of plays. We just weren’t quite clean enough.”

Both teams managed just six hits apiece.

Tags: Burrell, Freeport