GRAND CHUTE — The emphasis as the Aquinas High School baseball team sat on a grassy hill off the right-field line at Fox Cities Stadium late Wednesday morning was on progress, of which there was plenty.
The Blugolds would have preferred to be discussing a WIAA Division 2 state semifinal win over Seymour and getting ready to watch their opponent — Reedsburg played New Berlin Eisenhower in the second semifinal — for Thursday’s championship game, but the third-seeded Thunder stopped that from happening.
Second-seeded Aquinas struggled to get good at-bats against the pitching of Xavier Salzman, and despite creating some traffic on the basepaths, couldn’t turn three hits into enough as Seymour emerged with a 5-2 victory.
“This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I swear it’s not,” Aquinas coach Mike Dee said. “In 43 years of coaching, I’ve never seen a team accomplish something like this based on their experience and skill level, especially at the beginning of the season.
“The distance they traveled is the most amazing thing I have had the privilege of watching, and I mean that sincerely.”
The Blugolds (23-4) won the Division 3 state title last season and lost the championship game the year before. After bumping up to Division 2 for this spring due to the association’s competitive balance performance factor, they lost just three regular-season games and tied Holmen for the MVC championship.
Wednesday’s loss was just the second in a state semifinal (dating back to a 7-6 loss to Marathon in 2009) for Aquinas, and it was denied an eighth championship game in nine appearances.
As Dee said, you run into good teams at state, and Seymour (26-3) — it plays top-seeded New Berlin Eisenhower (23-5) for the title at 3 p.m. Thursday — is certainly one of them.
The Thunder scored once in the second inning, once in the third and once in the fifth for a 3-2 lead. The one-run third was more or less a victory for Aquinas because Seymour sent seven batters to the plate and had two hits, two walks and one hit batter.
Escaping with a 2-2 tie instead of a deficit was big.
“We battled, kept our composure and limited the damage,” senior catcher Jacob Thornton said. “Waylon (Hargrove) threw some good pitches, we got out of it, and we were happy about that.”
The Blugolds didn’t escape the sixth, though, and that started with Hargrove retiring the first two batters. A single to left, a single to right and a hit batter followed before Salzman delivered a slow roller through the left side of the infield for two runs and the 5-2 lead.
“As coach told us,” Thornton said, “baseball happened.”
The Thunder did make some solid contact, but they gained most of their success by simply putting the ball where the Blugolds weren’t.
“They get a ground ball that gets through the hole, a flare that gets over the second baseman’s head,” Dee said. “To be fair, we’ve been on that side of things, too.
“That’s baseball.”
Hargrove pitched 5 2/3 innings and allowed four earned runs on 11 hits and two walks. He struck out three.
Senior second baseman Isaac Schelfhout doubled twice for the Blugolds during a 2-for-3 performance. He scored on a wild pitch after the first one, and Ryan Johnson followed with a sacrifice fly that scored Hargrove for a 2-1 Aquinas lead in the second.
His double to right-center in the sixth gave the Blugolds some momentum by putting runners on second and third with one out as they faced the 5-2 deficit. It appeared that Thornton could have scored on the play, but he held up at third.
Dee said he didn’t hold Thornton, but Thornton said he stayed at the bag because he didn’t think the ball was hit as hard as it was and thought there might be a play at third. By the time he realized he could have gone, it was too late. The next two hitters were retired in order to end the threat.
Johnson hit a seventh-inning single but was still at first base when the game ended on a strikeout.
“We made a couple of errors, but I think we kept it together the whole game,” Schelfhout said. “They have a good team, and it just turned out how it did, which sucks.”
