The good news was one of the Elite 8 high school baseball teams that were left entering the Class 2A State Tournament at Shawnee High School’s Ed Skelton Field was the Central Tigers.
Unfortunately, the Tigers had to open up with No. 1 Oktaha in a battle of Tigers in Thursday’s state quarterfinals, and the top-ranked team in the state moved on with a 10-0, five-inning victory.
“You have to beat them at some point to win it,” Central baseball coach Wes Green said. “We just got them right off the bat. We tried to give them our best shot.”
Oktaha (30-3) scored three runs in the first inning on a one-out, tworun double by Mason Pickering and a two-out RBI double by Nic Tolbert for a 3-0 lead.
Oktaha doubled its advantage to 6-0 in the third inning, thanks to a two-out rally that was fueled by a tworun double by Braxton Casey and an RBI double by Canyon Elam.
The top-ranked team then made it 9-0 in the fourth inning on an RBI single by Darren Ledford and a two-run double by Pickering. Kale Testerman’s RBI double in the fifth inning put the game into run-rule status.
Central, which ended the season at 18-16, had only two batters reach base. The first Tiger to reach base was Waylen Campbell as he was hit by a pitch from Tolbert, Oktaha’s starting pitcher, with two outs in the third inning to break up Tolbert’s perfect game.
Central’s other batter to reach was Aiden Sainer, with a one-out infield single.
The good news was Central was Tolbert only had two strikeouts in five innings as 13 of the outs were made on balls put into play by the Tigers.
“You tip your hat to them,” Green said. “They’re No. 1 for a reason.”
However, the silver lining in the clouds is the fact Central was one of the eight teams at the state tournament, which was quite an accomplishment seeing how the season started to where it ended.
“We’re extremely excited about it,” Green said. “To play our type of schedule, We take our lumps in March, knowing it’s going to get better in April. We did our best to be playoff ready. We don’t forget about the walk-offs (losses) and the close losses. We learn from them. We just want to get better.”
Hardy Buzzard took the loss, going the first two-plus innings with a strikeout. Connor Walters pitched an inningplus with two strikeouts, then Cade Tucker went the rest of the way with a strikeout.
