The Bucs' season of records that was the 2021 campaign came to an end in the Midwest Conference Championship games Saturday. Beloit fell to the South Division winners of Illinois College 6-3 and 8-1 in the championship series at The Ballpark.
The championship series Saturday was a battle of the brutes pitting one of the nation's top slugging teams in Beloit against one of the best homerun hitting squads in IC. The Blueboys did what they've done all year, used the longball to their advantage in game one. Three solo jacks in the first, fourth and six gave Illinois College a 3-0 lead.
James Wicker got the Bucs on the board in the bottom of the sixth reaching on a hit-by-pitch. He advanced all the way to third on a fielding error and came in to score later in the inning on a sacrifice fly from
Brett Kiger.
With the offense gaining some traction,
Matt Crandall sparked the bats with a leadoff single through the left side in the seventh. He stole second and
Nick Schmidt followed with a base knock to center that had Crandall coming around to score. After a change on the mound for IC and an out, Wicker came up clutch again, this time with an double to center to put the tying run 90 feet away.
Garrison Ferone lofted a ball to left field that was deep enough for Schmidt to score for the RBI sac fly to knot the game 3-3.
Illinois College responded immediately plating three runs on two hits with two Buc errors in the top of the eighth to reclaim the advantage 6-3. That score held for the final.
Beloit left nine runners on base in the contest while IC stranded just two. Wicker and Crandall each tallied two hits with each scoring in the game.
Kaiya Nishino suffered the loss on the mound allowing four earned runs in 7.1 innings of work while striking out five.
Once again it was IC's bread-and-butter, the longball, that bolstered the Blueboys in game two. Illinois College, the home team in the game, took an early lead on a RBI sacrifice fly in the bottom of the first.
The Bucs responded in the top of the third with Crandall coming in to score on Schmidt's double to center that hit near the top of the fence.
In the fourth, the Blueboys added two to their tally on a two-run homer and followed with a solo shot in the fifth to make it 4-1. IC would add two more in the sixth before capping the scoring with a single run in the seventh for the 8-1 final.
Schmidt registered three of the team's four hits in the game adding an RBI to lead the Buc offense.
Tommy Murray struck out five in the start but suffered the loss allowing three runs on three hits in four innings of work.
Illinois College receives the league's automatic bid to compete in the NCAA Division III Tournament. The NCAA selection committee will announce the 2021 bracket that includes a number of at large selections Sunday.
Despite playing ten fewer games than a typical year due to COVID, the 2021 Bucs smashed records throughout the season. As a team, the squad wrote 2021 at the top of the record book in runs (324), doubles (88), triples (20), homeruns (32) and RBI (291). Beloit also put together a program-best 17-game win streak adding the final eight games from 2020 to the nine wins the Bucs' tallied to open this season.
Individually, a number of Bucs wrote their name in the history books including
Bronson Balholm in triples (6),
Matt O'Leary and
Brett Kiger in homeruns (8), O'Leary in RBI (49) and Wicker in the hit-by-pitch category (15). In addition to those, there are a number of 2021 Beloiters that now rank among the top five in a host of statistical categories in game, season and career totals.
The season came full-circle, starting at record-pace and continuing at that clip throughout the season. The simple fact that the 2021 Bucs were able to break so many team and individual records with a smaller slate of games than usual is one of the reasons this season was so special and, of course, one for the history books.
