By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
LEXINGTON – The beat goes on for Northern Kentucky in the state high school baseball tournament.
As it did for Simon Kenton’s Pioneers here Thursday morning in the first game of the 2024 state tourney at Lexington’s Legends Field.
As it has for 60 of the past 61 seasons when every Northern Kentucky team but one has headed home with a loss in the season’s final game.
“Downstate,” they call it, where Northern Kentucky teams, almost without fail, go down to defeat.
Even when, like Simon Kenton, they out-hit their opponent – doubling them in this case by six hits to three — as the Pioneers did against a heady Russell County Lakers crew that just played like they knew they were going to win.
As they did, 4-1 on this day. As Russell County did two years ago in a 1-0 win over Beechwood.
“If you’d have told me that, I’d have been sure we’d be playing Saturday,” Simon Kenton Coach Troy Roberts said of the Pioneers’ hitting edge. He knows that feeling. The last two times Roberts has been here — with the Pioneers in 2014 and 2018 – they went all the way to the championship game only to fall.
“We just didn’t get any timely hits,” Roberts said with a shake of the head of so many Northern Kentucky coaches before him. “We had our chances.”
As if any Northern Kentucky team could ever feel that way with this history that’s becoming more than a pattern. Sure, Ryle’s Raiders, in another 10 a.m. game, get the chance to win one for Northern Kentucky Friday morning. But the shame of this was that Thursday’s game was also winnable.
You just can’t allow a team more runs than hits – four runs on three hits. You especially can’t allow them a hit batsman and four bases on balls in the same inning. Two runs. No hits.
Not when you’re down 4-1 in the fifth having left nine runners on base in your first five at-bats and getting runners home is proving to be a hard slug. Twice with runners on second, the Pioneers’ base hits couldn’t get the lead runner past third against the pulled-in Russell County outfielders.
Four hit-batsmen didn’t help Simon Kenton’s cause although two of those were of the Lakers’ big hitter, junior Mayes Gosser, the state’s No. 4 hitter, whose first-inning blast at the 360-foot mark in left center looked to be a couple of feet below the top of the fence when it hit in the green.
And the Simon Kenton outfielders played it to a triple but with Gosser standing on third, the umps belatedly waved him home for a two-RBI home run that gave the 31-10 Lakers a lead they would not give up.
That he was hit by the pitch his final two times up was another example of how things went for Simon Kenton on this day: “I don’t even know how we hit him,” Roberts said, “we were trying to pitch him away.”
Not a surprise the way this one went. Close calls – on a foul ball overruled and called fair for an inning-ending play at third base to end a three-hit Simon Kenton potential rally in the second – and strikes/balls, all went one way.
“I’m not a coach that’s going to blame umpires,” Roberts said, but as to whether the Pioneers (27-16) got any close calls to go their way: “We did not.”
That made it a bit more difficult for Simon Kenton starter Logan Cones, No. 1 in the state in pitching wins with a 10-0 record and among the leaders in innings pitched (72.2) and ERA (1.25).
“Logan gave us everything he had,” Roberts said of Cones 4 1/3 innings. But on this day, it would have taken a shutout.
And after Gosser’s first-inning homer, that wasn’t happening.
SCORING SUMMARY
SIMON KENTON 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 – 1 6 0
RUSSELL COUNTY 2 0 0 0 2 0 X – 4 3 1
WP: Burtrag 6-1 LP Cones 10-1
LEADING HITTERS: Russell County: Gosser HR, 2 RBI; McGowan double: Simon Kenton, Rump single, RBI.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.
