COON RAPIDS, Minn.-- North Central Baseball is one win away from a return trip to the NCCAA Division II World Series after the Rams earned a hard fought 4-2 victory over Maranatha Baptist Bible College on Tuesday evening at Wintercrest Park. NCU used solid pitching, timely hitting, and several outstanding fielding plays to earn their spot in the regional championship game on Wednesday.
North Central faced Maranatha Baptist Bible College (Watertown, Wis.) in the regional semi-final after the Crusaders took a 3-2 first round victory over Lincoln Christian University (Lincoln, Ill.) earlier in the day. MBBC struck first with a run in the second inning but NCU answered back with a run of their own in the bottom of the inning when sophomore Ian Andrews (Coon Rapids, Minn.) blasted a solo home run over the left field fence to tie the game.
Senior Joe Robinson (Gilbert, Ariz.) made several dazzling fielding plays at his short stop position for the Rams including inning ending putouts in the first, third and fourth innings. Those base hit robbing plays allowed the Rams to get their bats going enough to plate a run in the bottom of the fourth and two in the bottom of the fifth before more outstanding defense clinched the victory.
Freshman Gary Ramos (Chicago, Ill.) led off the fourth with a triple and one batter later sophomore Isaac Gross (Grayson, Ga.) knocked him in with a timely base hit through the right side of the infield.
The North Central scoring in the fifth began when Ricardo Cardenas (Thorton, Colo.) led off with a single to center field and senior Matt Huberty (Detroit Lakes, Minn.) moved him over with a sacrifice bunt. Cardenas moved to third on a wild pitch before junior Ben Freitag (Lakeville, Minn.) knocked him in with a sacrifice fly to center field. Joe Robinson doubled and Gary Ramos came up next and scored him with a double of his own to give the Rams a 4-1 lead through five innings.
The Crusaders got a single run in the sixth inning but junior Devin Lehnhoff (Ellendale, N.D.) worked his way out of a bases loaded jam with two infield pop ups to hold of a Maranatha run.
NCU went down with out scoring in their portion of the sixth but two outstanding grabs by Ben Freitag in center field, including a full lay out catch, almost certainly robbed MBBC of two extra base hits in the top of the seventh and sealed the Rams victory.
Devin Lehnhoff earned the win by going all seven innings and allowing just one earned run on six hits.
Gary Ramos was 2-3 with an RBI and a run scored while Ian Andrews, Isaac Gross, and Joe Robinson were all 1-3.
The Rams will now await the winner of an elimination game between Lincoln Christian and Maranatha Baptist to be played tomorrow at 11 a.m.
The victor of that elimination game will take on NCU at 1:30 p.m. If necessary those two teams would face off at 3:30 p.m. to decide the 2012 NCCAA DII North Central/Midwest region champion.
The region champion will receive an automatic berth into the 2012 NCCAA Division II World Series played at Prasco Park in Mason, Ohio on May 9-12.
