Bennett Anderson’s best work on the mound this season has been in relief — it’s a testament to his confidence and level-headed attitude. But he’s willing to come in and get done whatever needs to be done, and that was on display during a complete game two-hit shutout of neighboring Lester Prairie Thursday.
“He’s just a solid, all-around player,” coach Tyler Maher said. “He’s so even-keel, and that’s what you want in a pitcher. He goes through adversity and just moves on to the next one.”
A five-run second and three-run third helped cushion Anderson’s strong performance, led by the middle of the batting order once again. Steve Heber came through with a double and three RBI and Mason Macziewski went 2-for-3 with two runs driven in. The balanced Laker bats are playing well at the right time, with section playoffs approaching and some tough pitching challenges coming up.
“It’s really nice that we’re hitting like this, gets our confidence up,” Maher said. “We’ll see how we do when we might face guys pitching 80, 85 in the playoffs.”
For Lester Prairie, they fall to 6-6 with a really important doubleheader against PACT coming up, and three more games left in the regular season after that. Though the offense was quiet against HLWW, head coach Ben Machemehl is confident the Bulldogs can get back to the way they were scoring eight, 10, 12 runs a game early in the season.
“I feel like we do have confidence building for the end of the season. Howard Lake might be the best team we’ve seen all year, the ball really jumps off their bat,” Machemehl said. “But you take those two big innings out, we weren’t that far out of it. Our two errors weren’t bad errors, we threw strikes pretty well; they just put the bat on the ball. We’ll build some momentum here.”
Jack Behning and Logan Lambrecht pushed base hits to the outfield for the Bulldogs, who are in a section that always has a surprise team make a run. Undefeated Randolph is the top dog, but the high school baseball playoffs are as much of an “anything can happen” time of year as there is. Machemehl knows that and a strong finish to the regular season would mean a lot to that aforementioned momentum.
“We’ve got to get hitting again,” he said. “If we play our game, we can make some noise (in the postseason). It’s Randolph at the top, then us and Mayer Lutheran and everyone else. We can compete with these teams.”
The neighborhood rivalry that crosses both sides of Highway 7 is something the respective coaches are excited to continue — Maher and Machemehl both began their regimes in 2020, but didn’t get a season at all.
“It would be great if we could play a few more section games to get ready for the playoffs, but we like what we’ve got here. If we can keep playing Lester, it’s a night game, that’s always fun,” Maher said.
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Follow Jared Martinson on Twitter: @JaredNHR