File photo by Travis Rosenau
New Ulm Cathedral’s Elliott Schabert races home during an earlier baseball game on May 1 at Mueller Park in New Ulm.
NEW ULM — New Ulm Cathedral pushed across four runs in the bottom of the fourth inning and then added a single run in the fifth as the Greyhounds improved to 14-4 on the season with a 7-3 win over Lake Crystal Wellcome Memorial Tuesday afternoon in a nonconference baseball game at Mueller Park.
Colin Anderson got the pitching win for Cathedral in relief of starter Jake Finstad. Finstad went the first four innings and allowed two runs on two hits while striking out six.
Anderson allowed one unearned run in three innings and fanned three.
Caden Larson took the loss for LCWM (10-3) in relief. He was charged with four runs in 1 2/3 innings.
Ethan Wiems had two triples and drove in two runs for the Knights.
Franta, Anderson and Elliott Schabert each had two hits for Cathedral with Schabert and Brock Wellmann each driving in two runs.
“That is a good AA baseball team,” Cathedral assistant coach Ryan Weier said. “They are going to be a high seed in their section. This was just an overall good baseball game. And I thought that we executed the back half of the game well. The first half [of the game] we had some struggles.”
The Greyhounds, who play on the road against Janesville-Waldorf-Pemberton on Friday, took a 2-0 lead with single runs in the second and third innings.
In the second, Schabert led off with a single and was sacrificed to second by Caleb Forstner. He then scored on a Wellmann line single to center.
In the third, Franta led off with a base hit before a throwing error on a Schabert grounder allowed Franta to reach second. A Forstner single plated Franta.
But the Knights tied the game with two runs in the top of the fourth before they took their only lead of the game at 3-2 in the top of the fifth on Wiems’s second triple of the game.
That lead was short lived as the Greyhounds scored four runs in the bottom of the inning on two hits and three Knights errors.
Anderson led off the inning with a single to center and took second on an error on the play.
That ended starter Jackson Born’s day on the mound.
Logan Mielke coaxed a one-out walk off of Larson. Schabert followed with a two-run double for a 4-3 lead.
Forstner reached on an infield error.
Schabert then scored on a Wellmann suicide squeeze bunt.
Forstner scored to make it 6-3 when Brock Carlson reached on an infield error.
“That is how the game of baseball is,” Weier said. “If you hang around, you have time to turn it around. That is why you play seven innings and today we needed all seven.”
Cathedral added an insurance run in the sixth on a Franta run-scoring single.
Weier said that this was Franta’s first start of the season.
“We switched up and this was Jake’s first start — the defense could have helped him out a little bit — and I thought he did a nice job,” Weier said. “And Colin came in and was really effective and shut the door on them. That is what good teams do — they have good players come in to help each other out.”