By Jon Akre

605  Sports

However the high-powered Pheasant offense wasn’t going to be held scoreless for long, as it was able to plate eight runs across the next five frames, leading to Munger reaching his pitch count in the sixth inning.

“He’s a really good pitcher, give him all the credit, but I also thought we had really good at-bats to get him out of the game pretty quickly,” said Winner/Colome shortstop Reed Harter. “We battled, had a lot of 3-2 counts, sometimes it didn’t go our way but we also hit a lot of at ‘em balls too.”

With Munger exiting, that brought in a familiar face for the Pheasants, as Chamberlain’s Mike Schwartz came on in relief with two outs in the sixth.

“I think it was one of those where we were kind of starting to gain a little more confidence, our swings were starting to connect a little bit better,” said Richey. “And then once they brought in their second pitcher, I think we were just geared up. We used to see him back in high school quite a bit, so we kind of knew what we had or what we were going to see.”

After going up 4-0 through the first five frames, the Pheasants struck for three more runs in the sixth with RBI-singles by Harter and Chandler Bakely.

And with the help of Connor Hopkins throwing 7.1 innings of shutout baseball, it was smooth sailing for the Sunshine League champs.

“He’s big, he’s our ace for sure,” said Harter of Hopkins. “We were going to throw him Game 1 no matter who we’re playing, he’s going to go out, and we expect him to throw strikes and shove. Didn’t have to throw too much offspeed tonight, worked a lot of fastballs so it went well.”

Harter and Oscar Pravacek each tallied three hits and an RBI, Dillon Lambley had two hits, a walk, and an RBI, Aiden Barfuss drove in a run on two hits, while Drew DeMers tallied a hit, two walks, and an RBI in the victory.

Munger allowed five runs on eight hits and two walks in 5.2 innings for Chamberlain while tossing four strikeouts. Munger also tallied two hits in the loss for Chamberlain.

The Pheasants move on to the second round of the State B tournament, and this veteran team is hungry for a deep run at Cadwell.

“We’ve been in this situation before, we’ve played teams that we felt like we should’ve beat early in the tournament and got beat, we’ve handled teams that we felt like we should’ve in the tournament,” said Richey. “When you have to win five games to be a state champ in a state amateur tournament, you have to show up every game and sometimes you got to win ugly.” Today wasn’t our best performance but it still got the job done.”

Winner/Colome will face Sunshine League-foe Mount Vernon in the second round on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at Cadwell Park in Mitchell.

“We have Mount Vernon next, they’re going to battle us on Wednesday night,” said Harter. “They always play well against us, so we’re just going to take it one game at a time right now.”