YORKTOWN — Before Delta senior Zane Cline could answer any questions about the Delaware County Championship, he was stopped by two young Eagles fans asking him to sign their baseballs.
Who could blame the kids? Those two young baseball fans had just watched Cline pitch another gem to lead Delta to a 10-0 victory over archrival Yorktown on Saturday, May 17, to claim a second consecutive county title.
“That’s just like, the one group of guys I would want to do it with,” Cline said (after signing the two baseballs, of course). “I mean, it’s just awesome to be able to do it with them again, back-to-back years, and that’s just great momentum for us to go into sectionals.”
The senior Taylor University commit earned his fourth win this season after pitching 5⅔ shutout innings, giving up just three hits and two walks while logging 10 strikeouts.
“Zane is one of the best players around … I think he’s starting to feel that way and get a little confidence to himself,” Delta coach Jacob Van Pelt said. “And I think the guys just love when he’s on the mound. They can rally behind him. I think they rally behind all of our guys, but really, like, you get a guy, you get your ace, we can call it, it’s just the way it is. You’ll feel good when you’ve got your ace on the mound.”
Both teams were able to put runners into scoring position early, but the starting pitchers did a nice job getting out of jams in the second. Yorktown junior Palmer Jones struck out Cline with the bases loaded at the top of the inning, and Cline responded with a strikeout with runners on second and third in the bottom.
Delta finally broke through in the third inning. Senior Chase Ritchie hit one into left field with the bases loaded to cross two runs, and fellow senior Gavin Case picked up two RBIs of his own with a shot into center field on the subsequent at-bat.
The next two innings went quickly before Delta regained steam in the final two. On the first at-bat of the sixth inning, senior Kaeb Stebbins smashed one into the wind for a solo home run — his second in as many days. Junior Ryan Neal added an RBI on a sacrifice fly, and senior Chase Flannery drove another run home to put Delta up 7-0.
In the seventh, Delta loaded the bases and added three more off a hit-by-pitch, a walk and a wild pitch.
“We’re just a team full of guys, man, our whole lineup is just playing well,” Van Pelt said. “I’m just so proud of these guys, even the guys in the dugout.”
Up-and-down week for Yorktown baseball
For Yorktown, it was a much longer day. The Tigers started their day with a 1:30 p.m. continuation of Friday evening’s semifinal contest against Daleville, which they won handily, 19-0, in five innings. Twelve different Tigers racked up hits in the semifinal, including freshman Cooper Luzadder, who got his first career hit in style with a three-run home run in the fifth to put a cherry on top of a dominant showing.
Despite playing half a game a few hours earlier, Yorktown didn’t seem to run out of gas in the county championship. It just wasn’t the Tigers’ day against their archrival.
“We just were outplayed, really, all the way across the board,” Yorktown coach P.J. Fauquher said. “Got to give Cline a lot of credit. He’s a good pitcher, very good pitcher, and tough to beat. He won the battles at the plate today, and we didn’t really do very well. We also put too many guys on base; we had too many walks, hit batters, and that hurt us. And then once we got down, we just couldn’t hit our way back in the ball game.”
It will be a tough loss to swallow, but it was a good week nonetheless with strong wins over Wapahani and Daleville on Wednesday and Thursday/Friday, respectively.
“We’ve just got to find a way to get back on track,” Fauquher said. “There’s plenty of lessons we need to learn from this game, but at the same time, we don’t have a lot of time to sit and think about it, we’ve got to turn around. We’ve got good Oak Hill team coming in on senior night, we’ve got to finish out our conference with Mount Vernon, so you know we just need to try to put some good baseball together here over the next week and try to get ready for sectionals.”
Contact Cade Hampton via email at cbhampton@muncie.gannett.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, @CadeHamp10.