Baseball: Gelhar’s walk off hit lifts Lourdes past P/GL

Lourdes’ Sam Gelhar had quite the up and down game Tuesday night.

After pitching four shutout innings to start the game with a 5-0 lead against Princeton/Green Lake, Gelhar surrendered six runs in the sixth. The Knights tied it up in the bottom half of the inning, but the Tiger Sharks got one back in the top of the seventh to take a 7-6 lead.

An error allowed Michael Godfroy to score, tying the game up at 7, and Gelhar stepped to the plate with one out and a runner on second.

Gelhar delivered, blooping a single into center field to give the Knights an 8-7 win in a Trailways-North Conference game played at Tiedemann Field at UW-Oshkosh.

Gelhar also picked up the win, striking out nine while walking four. He finished 2-for-5 with two RBI and a double.

Oshkosh Northwestern Media caught up with Gelhar after the game to talk about the win.

You provided the walk off hit there in the bottom of the seventh, just walk me through that at bat for me?

I struck out a couple of times before that and I thought I needed to redeem myself and wait back and move up in the box and try to get any piece of the ball and put it in play.

Do you like those situations where the game is on the line and you have a chance to win it?

Yeah I guess, it gets the adrenaline pumping.

That first inning you had three runs on three hits, how important was that to get off to a fast start?

It was a good confidence booster for us to get the lead and keep it throughout the lead.

Talk about your performance on the mound, you cruised through four innings but then fell a part a little bit in the fifth. You responded well after that but thoughts?

I pitched well up until that inning, I tried to bear down. I knew my defense had me.

You have now won your fourth straight game after losing four in a row. Do you feel like things are starting to come together for the team at the right time of the year?

I think we are starting to come together as a team and (we’re) playing team ball.

Goals for you and the team for the rest of the year?

Make a playoff run because we didn’t get too far last year so I want to get as far as we can this year.

Coach Reed Tyriver’s thoughts

I thought we came out really well. We had a good game plan at the plate after watching the pitcher warm up. We knew we had to wait back and that first inning we did exactly what we needed to, we hit the ball to opposite field, and then for the next five innings we decided to pull the ball and hit a home run and that doesn’t work.

Luckily we were able to come back to where we needed to right at the end and Sam was able to wait back by inches, centimeters, to get the ball into the outfield.

The thing I love about Sam the most is that he’s a competitor. You never want to see anyone lose their composure or get emotional and I think he handled it. Giving up six runs is hard to come back and the fact that he was able to come back the next three innings and hold them to one run, a run that shouldn’t been scored, the fact that he was able to come back to that and keep us in it was huge. He battles.

Alex Wolf: (920) 426-6661; awolf@gannett.com; on Twitter at @Wolfa07