Oran baseball team waits out weather in Class 1 title quest

~ Monday's scheduled semifinal baseball game against Sturgeon was pushed back to today due to rain

O'FALLON, Mo. -- Oran baseball coach Mitch Wood has a motto for when things don't go as planned for his team.

"What I preach to them is 'Get through it,'" Wood said last week. "You've got to get through it."

Now, in his 10th and final trip to the final four as the team's coach, his players will have to get through something new -- the postponement of their Class 1 state semifinal.

The Eagles' game against Sturgeon, which was scheduled for Monday afternoon, was postponed by rain. The teams will instead face off at 10 a.m. today at T.R. Hughes Ballpark in O'Fallon with the other Class 1 semifinal between Santa Fe and Dadeville to follow.

The Class 1 championship will be played at 10 a.m. Wednesday. The third-place games for Class 1 and Class 2 have been cancelled.

Sturgeon, the top-ranked team in the Missouri High School Baseball Coaches Association poll, is 15-1 this season.

The Bulldogs have just one senior on their roster in 6-2 pitcher Spencer Kelly, who is 7-1 with a 1.40 ERA.

Oran (20-5), ranked second in the coach's poll and still in search of its first state title, almost certainly will face either Kelly or sophomore Ryan Seidel, who started last year's third-place game between the two teams that resulted in a 9-4 win for the Eagles. Seidel is 5-0 with a 2.12 ERA. He also leads the team with a .475 batting average and 20 RBIs.

Sturgeon has six players in its lineup hitting above .300 and two more players with averages higher than .400.

Oran, by contrast, had just one player hitting above .300 and two more above .400 after the completion of district play.

Lead-off hitter Seth Ressel was batting . 416, No. 2 hitter Kody Moore was batting .362, and No. 3 hitter Alex Heuring had a .452 average.

The remainder of Oran's probable starting lineup had averages of .299, .222, .203, .155, .136 and .114, but Wood said the steady improvement of the bottom of his lineup has been pivotal during the playoffs.

"This group, I'm telling you, they've came a long ways," Wood said. "We replaced some good players last year. Pitching and defense will get you a lot of places, but like [in the quarterfinal game], we had to score runs. They've really came on as far as that part.

"I told somebody the other day a huge part of what's getting us to the next level is our bottom couple of kids, especially the [Thomas] Trankler kid at the end. He's batting ninth for me right now, but his on-base percentage is unbelievable the last two weeks because it is a key for us getting those top players around to hit again.

"I've never been in a position where I was, 'I'm not going to steal, I'm not going to do some things because I need to get the top of my order back up, but I'm there. I'm always looking -- I'm looking at my lineup going, 'When is this kid coming up?' And then 'Boom,' we get a big hit from 7, 8 or 9, and then all of the sudden we've got two outs with the top of the order up."

Ressel cited a two-out double by Trankler in Oran's 6-5 win over Oak Ridge in nine innings in the district championship game as being particularly important. Ressel followed that hit with a two-RBI hit.

No. 6 hitter Hunter Schlosser had the biggest hit of the team's sectional win over Cooter, when his two-out, two-RBI infield single scored two runs, and Trankler had an RBI double in the team's quarterfinal win over Naylor.

"Whenever there's a chance for the top guys coming up to bat, it's very big," Ressel said. "But for us to come up, the bottom batters have to get on, and they've been doing that really well lately, especially against Naylor and in the Cooter game. They got hits and brought us back up."

Oran is making its third consecutive trip to the final four. The last two seasons the team has lost by a single run in the semifinals after committing five errors.

"I think we've just got to play within ourselves," Heuring said. "We can't really get up because the moment you start getting too anxious and all that stuff, that's when errors start happening. You've just got to stay calm and play baseball. As long as we come out and play like we can, we'll be fine."

Many members of the Oran baseball team also were on the school's basketball team, which also advanced to the final four this year. The six players who received the majority of the playing time in basketball are expected to be in Oran's starting lineup today.

All the success can make it hard to appreciate the athlete's accomplishments, according to Wood, who said the reaction to the baseball team advancing to the final four was like "a day in the park."

"That's not always good because I don't know if the public itself or if our community has really grasped the idea of what this group of kids have done," Wood said. "No. 1 we have never had anybody go to the final four in basketball [and baseball], and by the way our track team is starting to be successful. We had 40 kids out for track this year, so we had a good group go to track. We've never did that, probably in school history.

"Then you have a group of kids who went to the final four three times in a row, and that's pretty impressive. ... That says a lot about what kind of hard work and what kind of kids these are that want to do those things."