Baseball: Jake Troyner delivers walk-off double to lift Joliet Catholic

JOLIET — Joliet Catholic’s Jake Troyner knew the stakes as he calmly watched a fastball cross the plate for strike two in the bottom of the seventh inning of Wednesday’s WJOL/Don Ladas Memorial Tournament quarterfinal matchup with Lockport.

And while that put the Illinois-Chicago recruit in the hole in the count he still remained confident.

Such a belief was warranted as Troyner took the offering two pitches later into the gap for a walk-off double that allowed Joliet Catholic to plate its third run of the inning and collect a 6-5 victory over Lockport.

Joliet Catholic (6-0) will play Providence at Joliet Catholic in the tournament’s semifinal round on Thursday at noon. Lockport (4-2-1) will play Plainfield East in a consolation bracket game immediately following the conclusion of the first game also at Joliet Catholic. Providence defeated Plainfield East 19-4 in another quarterfinal contest on Wednesday.

Joliet Catholic had tied the game during Troyner’s at-bat on a passed ball, but Troyner knew he still had work to do.

“The passed ball was huge,” Troyner said. “I thought he was going to come back with a hook to try to end it, but he missed down. I knew he was going to come back heater and I didn’t miss it.”

In what amounted to likely the game’s hardest hit ball, Troyner’s double easily scored the winning run from second.

It was a workman like inning from the Hilltoppers, who faced real peril from winning the game after Lockport posted a pair of runs in the top of the seventh inning to take a 5-3 lead on an RBI double from Adam Kozak and and an RBI groundout from Dylan Nagle.

But Lucas Simulick legged out an infield hit and John O’Brien coaxed walk to start the Hilltoppers seventh inning and then after falling in the hole early with two strikes Matt Simmons clawed all the way back into the at-bat and eventually earned a free pass of his own.

Simmons would be wiped out on the front half of a double play attempt by Lockport, which was denied when Zach Pomatto beat the relay throw by a step with Simulick coming around to score and close the gap to 5-4.

O’Brien would beat out a close play at the plate on the wild pitch to tie the game setting the stage for Troyner’s heroics.

“It’s the competition in something like this, Lockport is always going to give you a game,” Joliet Catholic coach Jared Voss said. “They aren’t going to give in and they are going to get after it and the same thing for us. When we’re down, we’re going to try to respond.”

It appeared early that Joliet Catholic might run away with the game right from the outset. The Hilltoppers had their first three batters reach and two of them scored, but a double play turned by Lockport squelched some of the potential offensive significance of the frame.

And it began to feel as if that might be the only offense that would be seen from either team. Joliet Catholic starter Lucas Grant faced the minimum through three innings and wouldn’t allow a Lockport hit until the fourth inning, a single by Nagle.

Grant’s control betrayed him in the fifth inning as he walked the first three batters, but his one-hit four inning performance was more than sound even if Lockport managed to push across two runs to tie the game after his departure.

“It was obviously freezing out there today,” Voss said. “And hopefully as the season goes on his pitch count will build back up and he can get through some of those things. But as you can see through his first three innings, he’s got some great stuff.”

Joliet Catholic reclaimed the lead in the bottom half of the fifth on a sacrifice fly from Pomatto, only to have Lockport lock things up again in the top half of the sixth when Colton Benaitis came around to score after he and Justin VanderTuuk rapped back-to-back singles.