This past weekend, June 15 and 16, Wagner’s American Legion Post 11 baseball team traveled to Creighton, Nebraska to take part in their annual Berry Pepper Tournament.

Our first game was against Albion Post 162 and Wagner would ride the strong pitching performance of Carter Cournoyer to a 5-1 victory. Carter would go 5.2 innings giving up one earned run while walking four and striking out 13 Albion batters. Frank Soukup came on to strike out the final hitter with two outs and the bases loaded to earn the save.

At the plate, our numbers 1 and 2 hitters, Soukup and Javian Pesicka got two and three hits respectively, with Soukup driving in one run and Pesicka scoring one. Ted Slaba doubled and scored a run. Hunter Loeffler and Tyler Tjeerdsma each singled and scored a run with Loeffler collecting an RBI. Carter Cournoyer and Matt Link added one hit each.

The second game of the tournament pitted us against a team from Tri-County (I never did inquire which three counties these were). The bats got rolling early as we used seven hits and three walks to score eight runs. Pesicka and Link would hit back to back doubles. Joey Cournoyer and Slaba would follow up with singles. Loeffler also singled after a Carter Cournoyer walk. Following a Carlin Hopkins walk, Soukup and Pesicka doubled and singled to account for the eight runs. And it was good things went well in the first inning as we would only add one more hit the rest of the way, that being a Link triple.

Once again Wagner’s pitching and defense were spot on as Link and Slaba combined for the five inning shutout. Link pitched three innings striking out six while Slaba pitched two innings striking out three. Tri-County collected just one hit and one walk for the game as Wagner would score the 8-0 victory.

The final game of the tournament matched us up against a team out of Greely. Pesicka started on the mound in this one and pitched well. He completed six innings giving up four runs, just one of which was earned, on five hits, two walks and one hit batsman while striking out two. Preston McFayden pitched a scoreless final frame, needing only 11 pitches to do so.

Wagner had baserunners in every inning but just could not come through with timely hits as we would fall in this one by a count of 4-1. Too many errors, both mental and physical, cost us in this game.

Offensively, Soukup, Link, Slaba, Joey Cournoyer and Christian Doom all had hits with Soukup scoring the lone Wagner run.