By Dan Weber
NKyTribune Sports Reporter
In the 12th straight year of Beechwood and Covington Catholic meeting in the 35th District championship baseball game, this annual event has become something of a “put-it-on-the-calendar” must-see moment for these Dixie Highway neighbors just 2.4 miles away.
Indeed, the threatening skies parted and created just enough rain-free time Tuesday afternoon to settle things as these rivals always have: In front of a standing room only crowd – this time in Ft. Mitchell.
“They’re just down the street,” said Beechwood pitcher Chase Flaherty, whose father, Steve, played and played well for CovCath Coach Bill Krumpelbeck several decades back. “We know most of them and we’re friends with some of them,” Chase said before leading his Tigers to an 8-4 win to even out the district rivalry at six wins each over the last dozen years while earning the District MVP award for his efforts.
Efforts that were almost certainly the difference as CovCath was forced to go through five pitchers – one of them, Marcus Suwinski, twice. And that was it, as Krumpelbeck noted that “in tournament games, when you score four runs, you should win.”
Unless the other team scores eight, which Beechwood (23-10-1) did starting in the first inning with a double from the first batter – sophomore speedster Tyler Fryman, the Tigers’ candidate for Ninth Region Player of the Year.
Good thing Beechwood had Fryman – “He goes, we go,” Beechwood Coach Kevin Gray says of the football/baseball star, although apologizing for putting so much on the centerfielder he installed as an eighth-grader and has been there ever since.
That’s because CovCath could counter with their own actual Player of the Year – at least the one from 2024 – shortstop Jackson Reardon, who has been out the entire season with a lower back stress fracture until three games ago.
“He’s a one-man wrecking crew,” said Dixie Heights Coach Chris Maxwell, who faced Reardon last week in his first game back, where the University of Cincinnati signee busted two home runs in a 6-4 win. “Three games in 16 weeks,” Krumpelbeck said with a shake of the head at Reardon’s home run to deep center on a two-for-four night when even his one out was crushed.
“My left fielder (Bobby Weier) said the ball he caught (on a first-inning line drive) was the ‘hardest ball I ever had hit at me,’ ” Gray said. And it’s not a surprise when you see Reardon now, at 6-foot-3 and close to 200 pounds with seven hits now — three home runs — in his 13 at-bats. Nor maybe is it a surprise that his stress fracture came as a result of pushing himself a bit too hard weightlifting.
“I’m glad he’s back,” Gray said, although “I hope I never see him on the field against us . . . he’s a beast.”
If they do face one another again, it could only be in next week’s regional finals. And Gray said he’s OK with that. Just as he was with the way his kids showed up, led by Flaherty, his tough tailback from the state champion Tigers this past fall.
“It’s Beechwood-CovCath, it’s always there,” the quick-delivering, waste-no-time Flaherty said. “I’ve always had that up-pace out there, it keeps the batters off-balance . . . I’m not trying to be the aggressor, just trying to keep them off the bases, to get them out.”
Which he did, limiting CovCath to five hits and four runs as the Colonels fell behind, 8-1, before scoring three late runs to close the gap a bit.
And now it’s on to Thomas More Stadium and the Ninth Region Tournament starting Monday after the Saturday draw.
“I think we’ve got a chance,” Gray says. But so does CovCath, he says, with Reardon back, in a region where the top four or five here look to be in that group.
And even with a number of the top teams sporting double-digit losses, that’s not the negative it might appear, Gray says. “The teams around here don’t put together schedules to win 25 games,” he says. But to get better when it counts the most. Which is next week.
Krumpelbeck, Kentucky’s second-all-time winningest KHSAA baseball coach, agreed. “We know what we have to do.” And that would be? “We usually give games away,” he said of his team’s four errors, seven bases on balls and two hit-by-pitches with run-allowing errors including a pair on throws that sailed on Reardon on slow bouncers deep in the hole.
An issue of not being game-ready after all that time off? “Nope,” Reardon said as he was doing his postgame stretching. “I just have to do better.”
NOTED: All-35th District Team: Sam Addington, Holy Cross; Braxton Graves, Holmes; Reardon, CovCath; Caleb Arrasmith, Beechwood; Logan Wermuth, CovCath; Fryman, Beechwood; and MVP, Faherty, Beechwood.
SCORELINE
COVCATH 0 0 1 0 0 3 0 – 4 5 4
BEECHWOOD 1 1 0 1 5 0 x – 8 7 2
WP: Flaherty (7-1), LP: W. McEvoy (5-2)
Hitters: CovCath: Reardon 2-4, HR, RBI; Suwinski double, 2 RBI; Yuskewich 2-3, double, RBI. Beechwood: Fryman, 2-2, 2 BB’s, 2 runs; Flaherty 2-4, RBI.