Box Score

Grand Chute, Wis. - If the players from The College of Wooster (Ohio) get any looser, there may be no stopping the Scots in the NCAA Division III Baseball Championship.

The freewheeling Scots pounded out 19 hits and got a great pitching performance from Mark Miller en route to a 14-1 win over Kean University (N.J.) in a winners’ bracket game on Saturday (May 23) at Fox Cities Stadium.

“We’re saying, ‘Are we really in the World Series right now?’ We’re having fun and playing loose,” Wooster left fielder Stu Beath said. Beath went 3-for-4 with two runs batted in and two runs scored.

“The last two games in the tournament we’ve been swinging hot bats. Everyone up and down the line has been smoking the ball.”

Wooster scored in every inning but the second, and Miller scattered six hits over seven shutout innings.

“It’s the World Series. We’re done after this week,” Miller said. He struck out two and walked three. “Why not have fun?”

Wooster (41-9) advances to play at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday (May 24) against either the University of St. Thomas (Minn.) or Shenandoah University (Va.). Kean (39-10), which got a solo homer in the eighth from Lee Cavico to avoid its first shutout in 84 games, faces Chapman University (Calif.) in an elimination game Sunday at noon.

“There wasn’t much stopping them at this point,” Kean coach Neil Ioviero said of Wooster. “They are a very, very good team. I really enjoyed playing them.

“Today we just got beat by a better team. Every pitch that we got up or that we hung, they hit it hard.”

The Scots kept piling up hits and single runs early. Wooster scored one in the first, third, fourth, fifth and sixth to lead 5-0 after six innings. Kean starter Ryan Zamorsky lasted only four innings. He allowed four runs on six hits.

“I could hear it in their dugout that they weren’t afraid,” Miller said of Kean.

“Coach P (head coach Tim Pettorini) just kept getting after us and we pulled away.”

Wooster started to really stretch its advantage in the seventh. Luke Sutton’s lone hit of the game was a two-run double to give the Scots a 7-0 advantage.

Wooster added three more runs in the eighth, with Zack Vesco belting a run-scoring double and pinch-hitter Colin Meinzer smacking a RBI single. Vesco went 3-for-5 on the day with two RBI and two runs scored. Catcher Shane Swearingen matched Vesco with three hits to pace the Wooster attack.

The Scots added the finishing touch with four more runs in the ninth. Beath, Matt Gorezinger and Chris Wood all had run-scoring singles in the inning. Groezinger went 2-for-4 with two RBI and two runs scored.

The top four hitters in the Wooster lineup, Sean Karpen, John Warren, Beath and Groezinger, combined to go 9-for-17 with six RBI and eight runs scored.

“We knew we would have to play a very good game to compete with (Kean). Mark (Miller) was very good, to say the least, and we had our hitting shoes on,” Pettorini said.

“This was our best game of the year - offensively, defensively, all the way around.”

By: Joe Vanden Acker (Sports Information Director, Lawrence University)