Nevada upsets 21-1 Pleasant Hill and heads towards their third District Championship baseball game in five years

A game that the Tigers were not supposed to win on paper, they made reality on Tuesday night in Harrisonville, Mo. The 16-6 Nevada Tigers beat the 21-1 Pleasant Hill Roosters that left the Roosters scoreless with a score of 5-0. “This was the type of performance that we've been waiting for all season that we know that our guys have been capable of,” said Head Coach for the Nevada Tiger Baseball team Danny Penn talking to Mike Harbit of KNEM KNMO communication. “Our hitting has been there and maybe our defense has been lacking or our defense has been there and we've not been productive offensively. But facing a quality opponent obviously as we spoke pregame, their record and their ranking speaks for itself. We had to do the little things right, and we did those things today.”

The game started out with Nevada grabbing the lead early in the top of the first inning. No. 28 Case Sanderson pitched for the first majority of the game, and left the Roosters scoreless throughout the majority of the ball game. “I don't want to speak for Case,” quoted Penn, “but I think that whenever they got runners on this one, he really locked in and focused when he got into the stretch. When he's working on the one I thought his timing was just a little bit off. But when he got into the stretch, you know, he really had to bear down. He and Cade (catcher for the Tigers) did a great job of mixing looks, mixing holes, mixing pitches and just really keeping Pleasant Hill off balance to where they really couldn't put a big inning together. I think aside from maybe the fourth inning where I think he had an eight pitch inning, he was pitching with traffic and just did a great job of minimizing and again defense made plays behind when we needed them.”

The fourth inning is where Nevada extended their lead even more #22 Logan Marquardt hit an RBI that allowed two base runners for Nevadas to score and make the lead now 4-0. Penn commented by saying, “That was big because a two run margin, you feel good about it. If you're on the other side of the two runs, you feel like that's not that big of a mountain to climb, but adding on they're getting those two extra runs and make it four and that's a much bigger deficit to overcome. I love the energy in the Pleasant Hill dugout, but when that base hit came and we scored those two runs, it got a lot quieter over there and just again, deflated their sails and big time AB for the senior there. Happy and proud that he came through.”

Though it was a great victory for Nevada, it didn’t come without a bit of a scare. No. 4 junior Cade Beshore ended up with a bloody nose during his at bat, after the ball hit the ear flat on the helmet, and then contacted Beshore’s nose, which left him bloodied for a bit. Penn talked about how tough catchers have to be to play that position. “He's a catcher in everything that that means. He's hard headed and he's tough. He's had nosebleed issues already, so that was just kind of a situation that was already possible and then getting hit in the nose just kind of sped that up. So I’m happy that we were able to get it stopped and he got cleared to go back in and you know, you didn't know what happened. You would have realized there's nothing different with him. Just did a great job of getting back in the game playing baseball.”

Now with the focus shifting to Thursday’s game against the Summit Christian Academy, with a record of 21-2-1, Penn is going to stick with Senior #14 Eli Cheaney, who subbed for Sanderson in the final inning of Tuesday’s game. “We debated going to Caiden Klumpp there to finish this one out just to try to save Eli, but we thought in that situation where Case had already gotten laid off, we just needed to get two outs. It would kind of serve to get Eli on the mound to where you start to be at Thursday's throwing us now and it's not a new environment, new atmosphere. I think he threw 10 pitches and so he'll be fine. He'll be good to go. 100% on Thursday.” The now 17-6 Tigers will face the Summit Christian Academy at 5 p.m. at Harrisonville High School in Harrisonville Mo., to battle for the MSHSAA Class 4 District 12 Championship.