Luverne baseball team loses game to Paynesville, faces Fairmont

The Luverne High School baseball team won one game and lost one game in the Section 3A tournament this week.
The Cardinals defeated Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City 9-0 May 28 before falling to Paynesville 5-0 June 1.
The loss moved LHS to the elimination bracket of the tournament. The Cards faced Fairmont Tuesday night (June 4) in Jackson for a chance to play in the section championship game.
 
Paynesville 5, Luverne 0
Luverne fell from the Section 3A baseball winners’ bracket with a loss to Paynesville.
The contest between the two top seeds in the tournament (Luverne in the South subsection, Paynesville in the North) was played in Marshall Saturday.
LHS moved to 20-3 on the season with the loss.
Paynesville scored one run in the second inning, and the game remained close until the top of the final (seventh) inning.
Eight Paynesville batters came to the plate and scored four more runs off only two hits to secure the victory.
Luverne’s Jake Haugen pitched five complete innings, giving up four hits and one run while striking out five Bulldog batters.
Isaiah Bartels pitched the final two innings for the Cardinals. He gave up two hits and four runs and struck out one batter.
Gaige Nath led the offense for LHS with two hits in the game. Haugen and Colby Crabtree had a single and a double respectively.
 
Box score                 AB  R  H  BI
Crabtree                    2     0   1   0
Nath                           3     0   2   0
Serie                         3     0   0   0
Haugen                      3     0   1   0
Von Tersch               0     0   0   0
Bartels                      3     0   0   0
Lundgren                   2     0   0   0
Reisch                       3     0   0   0
Sterrett                      3     0   0   0
Buss                          2     0   0   0
Cowell                       0     0   0   0
 
Luverne 9, A-C-GC 0
The Cardinals nailed down their third consecutive tournament win when they bested the Falcons during a winner’s bracket game in Marshall May 28.
Jake Haugen pitched a complete game and was one of three Cardinal players to drive in a pair of runs to highlight the victory.
After surrendering a pair of hits in the top half of the first inning, Haugen bounced back to toss six hitless frames during a seven-inning, two-strikeout performance.
Haugen helped his cause by chasing home the first run of the game with an RBI double in the bottom half of a first inning that included an RBI ground out by Isaiah Bartels.
LHS went on to score one run in the third inning, two in the fifth and four in the sixth to win the contest handily.
Gaige Nath, who led the Cards with three hits, singled and scored Luverne’s third-inning run on a throwing error by A-C-GC.
Haugen doubled home his second run of the game and Bartels recorded a sacrifice fly when the Cards upped the lead to 5-0 in the fifth.
Nath singled home a pair of runs and two more counters scored on an error by the Falcons when LHS capped the scoring in the sixth inning.
 
Box score                 AB  R  H  BI
Crabtree                    3     1   0   0
Wenninger                0     1   0   0
Nath                           3     3   3   2
Serie                         4     1   0   0
Haugen                      3     0   2   2
Von Tersch               0     0   0   0
Knips                         0     1   0   0
Bartels                      3     0   0   2
Lundgren                   3     0   0   0
Reisch                       3     1   2   0
Sterrett                      2     0   0   0
Nekali                        1     0   0   0
Buss                          2     0   0   0
Cowell                       1     1   1   0