SPORTS

Baseball: Tingle pitches Ridgewood back to regional

Sam Blackburn

WARSAW – Caleb Tingle was surprisingly pitch-efficient during his 13-strikeout performance against state-ranked St. Clairsville.

Ridgewood's Caleb Tingle delivers a pitch in the second inning of a 5-1 district finals win over West Muskingum on Saturday at River View High School in Warsaw.

For that he was thankful on Saturday.

Pitching on just two days of rest against West Muskingum and ace lefty Dylan Lyons, Tingle again made all of the timely pitches in their Division III district championship game.

Given a four-run lead, he escaped a pair of late jams to give Ridgewood a 5-1 win at River View's Ron Tisko Field.

Tingle went the distance, allowing eight hits with six strikeouts. It was enough to send the Generals into their second regional semifinal in three years under coach Chad Lahna.

The Generals (20-7) will play Wheelersburg (28-1) at 5 p.m. on May 28 at Chillicothe Paints Stadium. Albany Alexander (24-4) and Marion Pleasant (19-9) are in the other semifinal.

"I'm really happy for our seniors," Lahna said. "They've come a long way. This is their second district title in three years and I think that says something about them. They're a pretty close-knit group and it's always nice to get a district title out of it."

The Generals led only 1-0 after four innings before a rare bout of wildness from Lyons allowed the Generals to break it open in the fifth.

Lyons, who shut out top-seeded Garaway in the district semifinals, walked four straight batters with one out to bring in the second run.

Dillan Shepler followed with a sacrifice fly, and a two-out error at shortstop sent home another to make it 4-0.

Senior Alex Croston, whose run-scoring double in the fourth broke a scoreless tie, said getting the first run ignited the team.

"Everybody in the dugout was up after that," Croston said. "That's when we started heating up."

It also helped their pitcher.

"When you get the lead you can relax and let your fielders make plays," Tingle said.

Known for their late-game comebacks — they needed two to get out of the sectional at Cambridge — the Tornadoes rallied in the bottom of the fifth.

Alex Lynch's run-scoring single made it 4-1 before the Tornadoes loaded the bases with one out.

Tingle had an answer. In this instance, he struck out Drew McKenzie with a sharp curveball before inducing Greg Kanavel to ground out.

The next inning, the Generals got the run back when No. 8 hitter Logan Slusser singled home Braeden Smith.

Tingle wanted to come back on short rest but said he wasn't sure of Lahna's plan until after gauging his recovery on Friday.

Breaking pitches were his primary weapon against a Tornadoes lineup that made contact against his fastball for much of the game.

That wasn't coincidental.

"If I am coming back on two days rest I'm not going to be throwing as hard as I usually do, so I needed something to fall back on," Tingle said. "When you've got a fastball and some sort off-speed (pitch), when you mix those two together you can get rolling. I thought I did well today."

Lahna felt Tingle deserved the ball, but the decision wasn't clear-cut. He considered using him in relief.

"If we do change him it changes our defense, and for the last three games our defense has been what it is and they feel pretty comfortable," Lahna said. "When you move him out to center field, it moves our center field to left and it changes a lot of things."

Lahna knows the Pirates, led by ace pitcher Wade Martin, will be a challenge. Martin defeated the Generals 4-0 as a sophomore in the regional finals.

"It gives us three pitchers to face back-to-back-to-back that are pretty good," Lahna said.

sblackburn@zanesvilletimesrecorder.com

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Twitter: @SamBlackburnTR