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By James Kinneen
Hometown Weekly Reporter
If you want to know how dominant Wellesley’s pitching has been this year, consider this: on Saturday, Justin Lindquist pitched a three-hit, no-walk, nine-strikeout complete game shutout over King Phillip.
He brought the team strikeout average down.
Such dominance been par for the course with the Raiders, who moved to 6-4 on the back of Lundquist’s dominant performance that saw him strike out the first five batters he faced, and not give up a hit until the fourth inning. To make matters more impressive, this was only Lundquist’s second career start. Coach Rob Kane noted how good he looked.
“He did a fantastic job; this was his second career start, but both starts this year he’s dominated,” said Kane. “He’s turned himself into a pitcher that goes out there, knows what to do and is extremely effective. He mixes and matches his pitches, keeps hitters off balance. He was dominating right from the start.”
But Lindquist has been in good company on the mound all year, as Coach Kane noted. “With our entire pitching staff, we’ve now struck out 100-plus hitters in ten games. To average 10-plus Ks a game says something about the pitching staff - Weycker, Lindquist, Driver, Maiona has helped us, and there’s a couple other guys who had some K’s as well.”
But while you’ll never lose a game giving up zero runs, you’ll never win a game not scoring any. To that end, the Raiders and their small ball tactics produced plenty of baserunners, but struggled to convert them into runs for much of the game.
A recovering Teddy Goss showed no signs of injury celebrating his two-run homer with his team. Photos by James Kinneen
“Teddy Goss has been hurt; he’s had a lot of bad luck,” explained Kane. “He missed his entire junior year with a shoulder injury. This year he hurt his wrist and missed a couple of weeks, and then two weeks ago, he rolled his ankle doing some conditioning work on the track. He didn’t have batting practice today. I couldn’t tell you the last time he’s taken live batting practice with the team, but he was to the point today where he was ready to get up there and swing it. Had he gotten on first base, we were going to pinch run for him, but he ended up hitting the ball out.”
That shot would provide the only run for either team, as a seventh inning double play by Matt Lussier would seal the win for the Raiders, who were treated to special “W” frosted cookies from a team member’s mom soon after.
Icing on the cake after a great win.
