Coming off of its third Division III district baseball championship in the past five seasons, ninth-ranked Northern Buckeye Conference runner-up Eastwood will face perhaps its most daunting challenge of the 2021 season.
The Eagles (26-3, 11-3) of 10th-year coach Kevin Leady will be facing one of the state's top pitching prospects in hard-throwing junior pitcher Jacob Miller of Baltimore Liberty Union (15-6) of the Mid-State League in Central Ohio.
Miller, a 6-foot-2 right-hander who has already committed to the University of Louisville, has a fastball that has been clocked at up to 92 mph to go along with an effective curveball and slider.
According to research done by Leady, Miller has recorded 21 strikeouts in a single game, and 20 in another.
That will be a tall order for an Eastwood team that has advanced with tourney wins over Columbus Grove, 8-0, Allen East, 3-0, and last Saturday over Minster, 2-1 in nine innings in a district final at Elida Middle School.
That is where the Eagles will be again when they face Miller's Lions on Thursday at 5 p.m.
“Regardless of him pitching or not, there's three phases of baseball,” Leady said. “We have to pitch it well, we have to field it well, and we're definitely going to have to put the ball in play. Easy outs are going to kill us.
“If we strike out 15 times, that doesn't make him stress at all. Somehow we're going to have to put pressure on him at some point, and try to squeak a few across, and hope our pitcher is really on. We have to limit their opportunities, too.”
If Eastwood tops Liberty Union, it would advance to Friday's 5 p.m. regional final at Elida against the winner of Thursday's 2 p.m. semifinal there between Archbold and Milan Edison.
Entering regional play, Eastwood counters with top pitchers Lake Boos and Ethan Rapp, who are each 7-1 this season. Boos has posted a 2.27 earned-run average with 100 strikeouts in 55⅓ innings, and Rapp has a 2.71 ERA with 74 strikeouts in 51⅔ innings.
“If we go and play our best game, we'd like to think we're going to be right in this thing,” said Leady, whose team has matched the best overall record in school history. “Pitching and defense have been our strengths throughout the course of the year. Hitting, in high school, goes up and down and fluctuates. We always say, if we can be good at two of the three phases, we're going to have an opportunity. And, the two phases we have to be really good at every time are pitching and defense.
“We want to limit the extra outs as much as possible — the walks, the errors. And, offensively, we want to pressure them as much as possible.”
Offensively, the Eagles have been paced by catcher Andrew Arnston (.456 average, 3 home runs, 33 runs scored, 28 runs batted in), shortstop Case Boos (.380, 38 runs, 22 RBIs, 35 stolen bases), DH Caleb Recker (.350, 1 HR, 17 runs, 15 RBIs), outfielder Jackson Bauer (.333), center fielder-pitcher Lake Boos (.321, 37 runs, 20 RBIs, 25 stolen bases), and first baseman Jordan Pickerel (.306, 19 runs, 22 RBIs).
Eastwood was forced to regroup mentally after losing a late three-run lead in a 9-8 NBC loss at Lake on May 21. Lake’s comeback win gave the Flyers an outright conference title, and prevented the Eagles from earning a share of the crown.
“As soon as that Lake game was over,” Leady said, “I took my chin and put it up high, and I told the kids, 'You have to do the same thing.' Even if we would've won that game, we have to act like the next game was the most important. We played the next night and won the sectional title, but the night before took a lot out of us. It really did. I don't know if a lot of people outside of our locker room expected this [tournament run] from us, but we did.”
First Published June 2, 2021, 9:10 p.m.
