After Cards-Mets, Hillsboro beats O’Fallon at Busch
If you thought the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Mets had a long day on Saturday, that was nothing compared to what the Hillsboro and O’Fallon high school baseball teams experienced.
Scheduled to play at Busch Stadium following the Cardinals and Mets on Saturday, Hillsboro defeated O’Fallon 4-2 in a game that began late Saturday night and ended early on Sunday morning and was also mentioned on the Fox national broadcast as well as ESPN’s Baseball Tonight.
“It is one of those days that you will never forget,” said Hillsboro first-year coach Jim Kowzan.
The Mets defeated the Cardinals 2-1 in 20 innings in a game that took six hours and 53 minutes to complete. After that game, kids were permitted to run the bases. After that, Hillsboro and O’Fallon, which had arrived around 12:45 p.m. to store their equipment before the Cards-Mets game, finally got to take the field.
High school games following Cardinals day games at Busch are not unusual, though what happened on Saturday and the early hours of Sunday was. The Hillsboro-O’Fallon game started at 10:50 p.m. It finished at 1:20 a.m.
“It was a lot of fun,” said O’Fallon coach Jason Portz, whose team has played at Busch Stadium for the past 10 years. “I think our kids enjoyed it.”
The high school teams are allowed to play two and a half hours or a full nine innings. Hillsboro beat O’Fallon in seven innings and then the teams played almost two more full innings so more players could play.
“Those kids had an experience they will never forget,” Hillsboro athletics director Ed Moreno said. “They will talk about it for the rest of the their lives.”
The Hawks (10-7) had several players contribute against O’Fallon (10-7).
Alex Jacobs had a double and scored a run and earned the victory on the mound after pitching three innings. Andy McKeever went 2-3 with a triple and two runs scored. Zach Fletcher was 3-3 with an RBI. Jordan King had a single and scored. Tyler Smreker had an RBI single. Bryar Langley added two hits.
“You sit there for as long as we were there, it was nice to get the win,” Kowzan said. If we went through all of that and got beat, it would have been tough.”
Moreno, the Hillsboro coach prior to this season, tried to make the long day a little easier on the Hawks. He went to the White Castle nearby to purchase eight Crave Cases, with cheese.
The total bill, he said, came out to $197.52.
The experience, of course, was priceless.
