It isn’t as if Bowling Green 6-foot, 180-pound senior pitcher Logan Neifer shut down Napoleon, but he kept the Wildcats off base enough to throw a complete game 7-5 victory on the Bobcats’ field Wednesday.
BG improves to 5-4 overall and 1-2 in the Northern Lakes League Cardinal Division.
Neifer pitched to contact, striking out four and walking one, but allowing 13 hits. The most pitches he threw to any batter over the first five innings was four as the Wildcats never took him into deep counts.
“I feel like I started off with a first pitch strike very well tonight and in the two-strike counts I threw like a sweeper outside which they didn’t really make good contact off of,” Neifer said. “Then a lot of plays the defense made for us. It definitely brings us confidence for this season.”
Neifer only threw 58 pitches through five innings, but in the sixth, with BG leading 7-1, he threw 29 pitches, allowing six hits and four runs, as the Wildcats closed to within two.
However, he stayed on the mound through the seventh inning, never losing his composure.
“He’s efficient, he throws well, he is not going to throw it by anybody and we know that,” BG coach Fred Riggs said. “He knows his identity and he comes out and pitches to his capabilities and he gets people out.”
Despite losing, Napoleon outhit BG, 13-5, but Napoleon stranded eight base runners. Getting base hits for Napoleon in the sixth was Jacob Shadle, Blaine Ford, Devin Dietrich, Eric Hershberger, Trey Rubinstein and Parker Woods, but Luke Hardy flew out to right field for the third out.
In the seventh, BG first baseman William Brose made two consecutive catches in foul territory, including a second catch barely in play behind the dugout and near the fence, and Neifer struck out the game’s final batter after reaching a full count.
Napoleon coach Eric Sprague said it took his team too long to figure Neifer out, plus the Wildcats left the bases loaded in the third inning after scoring just one run.
“He was good early,” Sprague said. “We made an adjustment there late — honestly, too little, too late.
“We had real good opportunities earlier to scratch across some runs but give the pitcher credit — he did a good job of mixing up speed. We were off a little bit with trying to drive that stuff and he did a really good job of locating pitches.”
After Napoleon scored the game’s first run, BG came back with four runs in the third and three in the fourth.
Rubinstein started on the mound for the ‘Cats, and after throwing two perfect innings, BG’s Jack Brown III doubled and Brose, Silas Green, and Neifer had base hits in the third inning.
In the fourth, one run scored when Rubinstein walked Brown with the bases loaded, and two scored when Neifer and Braden Loomis were consecutively hit by pitches with the bases loaded.
All three runs in the fourth were unearned because of an earlier error in the inning, but it was reliever Blaine Ford who hit his first batter, Loomis.
For BG, Brose was 2-for-3 and scored twice, Brown doubled, walked twice and had three RBI, Neifer had a base hit and two RBI, and Green had a base hit and scored two runs.
Rhett Winger reached twice on walks and scored both times, Caleb Kuntsmann reached on a walk, Loomis had an RBI, and Brent Boston scored a run.
Rubinstein led Napoleon at the plate, going 3-for-4 with a stolen base, run, and two RBI, Lucas Gerken was 2-for-4, and Ford was 2-for-4 with a double and run scored.
Woods and Hershberger both had a base hit and RBI, Luke Hardy had a base hit, and Dietrich had a base hit and scored a run for the Wildcats.
It capped off a two-game home-and-home series between BG and Napoleon on consecutive days, which is how the NLL is scheduling intra-divisional games. Napoleon won on its field Tuesday, 4-3, with a walk-off run in the bottom of the seventh.
“Back to back, but wish we could have been on the other side of it in the second game, but we dug ourselves too big of a hole,” Sprague said.
Napoleon’s winning run Tuesday emanated from a double steal, so the Bobcats were hungry to reverse their fortunes on Wednesday.
“We felt a little heart burned from yesterday for sure in that walk-off win by Napoleon, but hey, give credit to them — they battled,” Riggs said.
“Even today they battled and they continued to fight, so this is a big step for our maturity, for our team to know that when we have that time when things aren’t going our way that we can stop the bleeding, so to speak, and we can get back and still win a ballgame.”
