Baseball: Pitching could lead Brainerd deep into tournament

DI Legion State Tournament

Who: Brainerd Legion Post 255

When: Aug. 2-5

Where: Edina

Game One: Brainerd vs. Edina 1 p.m. Thursday

Brainerd is hoping a stable of pitchers will be the key to winning the Division 1 American Legion state tournament.

The four-day tournament kicks off for Brainerd 1 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 2, against the host team Edina. The 16-team tournament will conclude with a championship game 12:30 p.m. Sunday.

"Our goal is to win it," Brainerd head coach Dave Peterson said. "I don't know why you wouldn't.

"It shows, even in the districts and in college and the pros, pitching trumps hitting. I think we can play with anyone. If those kids throw like they did this past weekend or like we have through the year than we won't have an issue. We have a pretty strong defense; up the middle has been very good. We've had some phenomenal plays.

"We have some pretty good ball players. We have two of them committed to DI schools next year. Max Boran is going to be playing football at Concordia. We have two guys going to Central Lakes College."

In 204 1/3 innings, Brainerd has given up just 165 hits and 94 runs leading to a 21-12 record. Eric Martin has pitched the most innings at 36. He owns a 4-2 record with a 3.00 ERA. McCale Peterson enters the tournament with a 6-1 record and a 2.138 ERA. Hunter Wicklund is 4-0 with a 1.42 ERA and Colin Kleffman has a 1.731 ERA in 26 innings pitched.

"Our pitching has been phenomenal," Peterson said. "Legion is a little bit different than school ball. We do a few more tournaments and then we have the districts and at some of those tournaments, you're going to need a lot of pitchers. You can't live with four pitchers. You just can't because the games are just boom, boom, boom. You don't get any rest between the games. Literally, from the beginning of the year, we put all these kids on the mound. We won a lot of games because of it.

"That's OK. I learned who I had. We could get them in more games or throw them on the mound in a pinch and get them some confidence. We only had one player who didn't pitch and that was Josh Hukriede our catcher. He was the only player who didn't have an inning pitched out of 16 guys."

While pitching and defense are strengths, offense is admittedly not. Brainerd owns a team batting average of just .286. During the Substate 10 tournament, which Brainerd won, it had more hits in one inning than it did the entire rest of the tournament.

"I only have about four or five guys who can hit the ball and luckily those are the guys who have been there all season long," Peterson said. "I think our batting average is something like .270 or .280 and that's not really good for high school. If you take away four guys, it would probably be in the .100s pretty easily. That makes it hard."

Brainerd's leading hitter is McCale Peterson, who is batting .427 with 18 RBIs and 28 runs scored.

Boran is batting .256 and is second on the team with 14 RBIs to go with nine runs scored. Colin Kleffman is hitting .275 with 11 RBIs, 19 runs and is second on the team with five doubles. Hunter Wicklund enters the tournament with a .338 batting average. He has six RBIs and 17 runs scored.

Peterson and Kleffman have the team's two home runs. Peterson has three triples and Boran one to account for all of Brainerd's triples. Of the team's 248 hits, only 42 have been for extra bases.

So how does Brainerd score runs?

"We steal a lot of bases," Peterson said. "Lowell (Scearcy) did that too on the high school team. I've known these kids for awhile. I coached some of them since they were 9 or 10 years old so I knew who was fast and who wasn't.

"We steal a lot of bases. I'm not a big bunting guy so we steal bases at about a 90 percent clip. I think we had five sacrifice bunts. That's not very many."

Brainerd has 64 stolen bases, 22 from Peterson and 11 from Kleffman. All but three of the players have at least one stolen base.

Another key for Brainerd will be the experience. While it doesn't roster any college players, Brainerd does have mostly recent graduates on its team.

"They are laid back, pretty quiet and non-vocal typically," Peterson said. "We just go and do our business. We have had some unbelievable catches this summer. Our defense has helped and our pitching has been good, but it doesn't really get anybody excited. Hitting gets you excited and we can't get any so we don't ever get too excited. We can't get any runs scored. If we get two or three runs in a game we feel pretty good that we're going to win it."

Brainerd will be familiar with many of the teams in the tournament. Also advancing was St. Michael-Albertville, which Brainerd played in the Section 8-4A finals. Alexandria and Sauk Rapids both have teams at state. Buffalo, which Brainerd beat 11-9 in the section tournament, also has a team at state.