By SPENCER BATES
OLEAN — While the final 7-2 scoreline may depict a one-sided affair, there was not much that came between the victorious Olean baseball team and Portville.
Efficiency was the name of the game as both the Huskies and Panthers managed to connect for nine hits on the evening. The former just so managed to make more of their connections.
With their respective league business taken care of, the battle between the sides was a tune-up game for the fast approaching postseason and according to both Olean coach Les DeGolier and Portville coach Joe Pleakis, they saw exactly what they needed to see over the course of seven innings.
“I think we got a lot of energy right now, I think we’re putting the ball in play, hard, and I think that our pitchers are doing their job,” DeGolier said. “Everybody’s doing their part. Now, we got to go make sure we have a day against a really good team … where we’re going to have to be firing on all cylinders. We’re going to have to be hitting the ball, we’re going to have to have good pitching and again, we got to keep playing good defense.”
Pleakis admitted to feeling a similar sense of confidence, bolstered by the 7-2 stretch they had to round out the regular season.
“(My players) battled,” Pleakis said. “We didn’t get down, we made some errors, and we kept firing away offensively. I feel we’re hitting it as well as we have, we’re hitting it hard. I feel great about our pitching, fielding, and I feel like we’ve been clicking now for several weeks. I just feel comfortable where we’re headed.”
Portville’s Dylan Chudy (1) swings at a pitch against Olean. Chudy wnet 1-for-2 with an RBI for the Panthers. (Spencer Bates)
Olean was the first to get off the blocks, benefitting from a handful of defensive mistakes from Portville, scoring once in the first inning and twice in the second. And while they went scoreless over the next two frames, the way that his team was connecting on pitches whether it be a hit, fly-out or ground-out, was a good sight for DeGolier.
“I feel like towards the end of the season, we have been connecting a lot, even in some games where we’ve only had a few hits, we’ve put the ball in play a lot,” DeGolier said. “We’re still working towards getting good, solid contact, barreling balls instead of getting soft contact. And I thought there was a good mixture of both tonight.”
And even though the Huskies’ early success was built on the back of Panther mistakes, Pleakis is not too concerned as he knows what his team is capable of on any given day. It just so happened that against Olean, they missed the mark in terms of their mentality on defense.
“I told the kids, I don’t look much into (the mistakes they made today), I don’t think those are mistakes we make next week,” Pleakis said. “I just think we didn’t come with that killer instinct today. We dropped one in center field that gets caught 999 times out of 1,000, at least. So, I’m not worried about that. It’s just when you string a couple of those together, that’s where we (get to) 7-2.”
However, Olean’s day would not remain perfect as it took its turn making some defensive mistakes, leading to Portville surging back into contention.
The visitors’ bats truly woke up in the top of the fifth inning, drawing four walks and connecting for two hits, all of which culminated in the Panthers cutting the deficit they faced to just one run.
“We’ve come along with the bats,” Pleakis said. “We’ve kind of preached it since the beginning of the season, you got to play seven innings, and we’ve been playing seven innings, which is tough to do in a game like this. We were not backing down, we’re out there firing away.”
DeGolier has noted before, how well his team plays defense is the best determining factor for whether or not they will walk away with a win.
And while Portville did threaten the host’s advantage, DeGolier got a response from his defense, Which did not allow the problems to snowball. A level of maturity and growth, once again, welcomed by the Olean coach
“Even though we made a couple mistakes, I thought we picked each other up,” DeGolier said. “And I think that’s the key. You’re going to make a mistake here or there, it’s baseball, the pros do it. But the key is how you respond. And I thought we responded really well tonight.”
Olean’s Sullivan Hoffman (11) chops a ball down the first-base line. (Spencer Bates)
The Huskies shut out the Panthers the rest of the affair and put up four insurance runs between the fifth and sixth innings, two of which were courtesy of Chase Vogtli’s booming home run that cleared the center field fence, officially putting the game on ice.
Olean, after jumping between wins and losses for a number of weeks, will now enter the postseason on the back of consecutive wins. The Huskies, who earned the No. 7 seed in Section 6 Class A, will carry that momentum into their Quarterfinal matchup against No. 2 seed Maryvale, away from home, on May 24 at 12 p.m.
As for Portville, it received the No. 6 seed in Section 6 Class C and received a bye into the Quarterfinal. The Panthers will hit the road to square off against No. 3 seed Clymer/Sherman/Panama on May 27 at 5 p.m.
AT OLEAN
R H E
Portville 000 020 0 2 9 2
Olean 120 022 X 7 9 2
Port: B. German (1 SO, 2 BB), C. German (2 SO, 1 BB) and Chudy
OL: Vogtli (4 SO, 1 BB), Johnson (0 SO, 5 BB), Teachman (3 SO, 1 BB) and Myers
