In a state tournament where you need to win three games in two days to hoist the trophy, how efficient pitchers are and how long you use them runs through the minds of every coach.

A lot of teams will start their ace in the quarterfinals and will rotate every 30 pitches to make sure everyone is available for Day 2. Others with less favorable matchups will throw their ace on the mound and use him as long as they can to secure their trip to the semifinals.

But when I look back on the State A high school baseball tournament this past weekend I couldn’t help but notice an interesting trend with nearly every single game.

That trend was mainly focused on pitching and how, in my opinion, it plays the biggest role in a team’s success: in six of the seven state tournament games, the starting pitcher of the winning team pitched further into the game than the losing team's starter.

A perfect example of this trend is with the State A champion, Sioux Falls Lincoln Patriots. To start the tournament, they elected to use their ace Caden Watson all seven innings in an 8-0 shutout.

Despite having a favorable matchup, the Patriots took the “You’ve got to get the first one,” approach in their opening game against Roosevelt.

Lincoln’s semifinal game was the only exception to this trend, as Sawyer Mindt exited the game after just two innings, Colin Lunders threw four shutout innings while the offense built an eight-run lead to defeat Brandon Valley.

And then in the championship against top-seeded Harrisburg, Lincoln got yet another great outing with Kasen Christansen, who threw seven shutout innings.

Often when talking about Class A baseball, you tend to see pitching staffs with a lot more depth as they usually play more games and it is more common to find one-sport athletes that play baseball year-round to focus on pitching.

But in these survival-and-advance style tournaments for smaller schools, it can be tough to stay alive when you get to a semifinal or a championship when you’ve already used your ace and are starting to work deeper into the bullpen.

When you start getting down to your No. 4 or No. 5 in the rotation, especially in Class B where the average number of Class B games played this season (including regionals) among the eight state tournament teams was just over 13, these pitchers usually don’t have more than 10 innings thrown on the year.

Of course there will be outliers to this claim (i.e. teams like Madison/Chester and Dell Rapids who have 20+ games played this season) but for the other six teams they’ll need to depend on guys who might not be comfortable or are able to throw 4-5 innings to go win a state championship.

Take for example the Howard Tigers, who have played the least amount of baseball out of any state tournament team this season at just 10 games.

They’ve only used four pitchers the whole season, with two of them combining for 9.1 total innings pitched.

That’s why the matchups early on in the tournament often matter more than the championship, because as you get later into the tournament the question “Who should we pitch,” turns into “Who do we have left to pitch,” for these small town teams.

But with the nature of this year’s Class B tournament, I think we could see a lot more strategy involved than compared to that of the Class A tournament.

Of the eight state tournament teams, none of the bottom four seeds finished in the top four seeds of their own region, giving teams such as Dell Rapids, Madison/Chester, Howard, and Bon Homme/Avon a little more confidence to hold off using their top guy.

With that in mind, what better way to figure out the best team in Class B high school baseball than Dell Rapids Tad Tjaden versus Madison/Chester’s JD Prorok in a pitching duel classic.