The all-important factor of winning the St. Louis Intercollegiate Athletic is gone for the Webster University baseball team. In years past they had to rely on a SLIAC Championship to earn a spot in the regional tournament, this year they can relax.
The Gorloks are No. 1 in the Central Region and 13th in the nation, as ranked by D3baseball.com. They had close to no recognition as a top team in the nation last year. Coach Bill Kurich said that is why this year there is a different approach to the conference tournament.
“There is a lot of difference playing for your life, if you lose the season’s done, as opposed to playing and if you lose there is still an opportunity to keep playing,” Kurich said. “There is still certainly a sense of pride about (the SLIAC tournament) and we’ve still talked about playing with some urgency.”
Corey Lasky, junior outfielder played his first SLIAC Championship Tournament game against Fontbonne University on May 9. He went three for five at the plate with an RBI triple and two runs scored. He believes the team is still pushing for their second straight title.
“If we take care of business now we will probably be the No. 1 seed in the regional tournament,” Lasky said. “If we win it will make our life a lot easier so we want to be rolling off a win into regionals.”
The Gorloks did lose their last game of the season coming into the conference tournament 10-0 at Illinois State University in normal, Ill. Kurich said he wanted to schedule a tough nonconference game at the end of their season.
“It definitely was a humbling experience coming off a 20-1 conference record,” Lasky said. “We realized that no team is too good to be beat and it grounded us a little bit. We had to make sure came out with a lot of energy today.”
In 2012 the Gorloks also lost two of their last three games heading into the SLIAC Championship Tournament — they were also the ones in a celebration pile on the mound when it was all over.
In the first round of the SLIAC Championship Tournament the Gorloks took down the Fontbonne University Griffins 14-5. This was Webster’s first game in eight days. It also was the first start for senior pitcher, Steven Dooley since April 28 at Spalding University where he gave up four runs in the first two innings, but eventually earned the win that day.
“Having a big break like that can suck,” Dooley said. “But it’s good that we came out and scored 14 runs.”
Webster had an unnaturally slow start this time against the Griffins as it wasn’t until the third inning that they put up three runs. This season Webster scored 17 runs thru the first three innings combined in three regular season matchups vs Fontbonne.
“It was a rusty day altogether,” Kurich said. “We didn’t play great defense and were a step slow in certain areas and certainly our second and third at bats were much better than our first.”
The worst inning for Webster came in the sixth with Dooley still on the mound. A couple of infield hits for Griffins along with Webster’s only error only the day, forced in all of Fontbonne’s five runs, four of those unearned.
“A lot of those infields singles were off the end of the bats, on good pitches,” Dooley said. “There wasn’t much we could do with those. But I was just leaving everything up and they were hitting it.”
Webster next will face Spalding who beat Westminster University (SCORE OF GAME). They will play at 5 P.M on May 10 at Glik Park in Highland, Ill.
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