Monday's prep baseball: Shelton's clutch hit lifts Tribe to late win
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The regular season ended on a high note for Du Quoin High School's baseball Indians late Monday afternoon.
Rallying back from a two-run deficit, the Tribe squeaked past host Goreville 5-3.
Wednesday at 4:30, Du Quoin (21-12) starts play as the top-seed of the Nashville Class 2A Regional. At 4:30, the Indians face River-to-River Conference rival Sparta. In Tuesday's "play-in" game, Sparta eliminated Waltonville/Sesser-Valier x-to-x.
"Today was a good win for us," Indians coach Tim Craft said. "We had very good pitching but did give away a few at-bats in the middle part of the game. When we started to be a little more selective at the plate, we started to hit the ball."
Goreville held a 3-1 lead into the seventh before the Tribe rallied.
Seth Baxter and Andrew Riley walked before moving up on Kegan Robbins' sacrifice bunt. J.C. Davis then reached on an error to score Baxter. Two-out walks to Brandon George and Jake Stanhouse then tied the score at 3-3.
An inning later, Du Quoin mounted its game-winning rally with two out.
Riley singled and Robbins walked. Speedy sophomore Dylan Pyron entered to run for Riley and moved to third base after a wild pitch.
Davis was then intentionally walked to load things up. Pyron and Robbins then scored easily when Shelton singled sharply into leftfield.
Trent Bigham (7-2) worked the final two innings with six strikeouts to gain the mound win. Robbins, Sam Gossett and Sam Kuhnert combined with the Indians' staff ace to strikeout nine and allow only six hits. Two of the three Blackcat runs were unearned.
Riley was 2-for-3 at the plate with Brandon George, Bigham and Stanhouse joining the hit parade.
"Tyler had a huge hit for us in the eighth," Craft said. "He's been pretty good in those situations all year. It was good to see our kids battle back against a good team late in the game and win. We gave them a couple of runs with errors but our kids battled back and made some really good defensive plays."