No. 4 Rio Grande wins KIAC Baseball Tournament over No. 1 IU Southeast
No. 4 Rio Grande wins KIAC Baseball Tournament over No. 1 IU Southeast
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KINGSPORT, Tenn. -- One great pitching performance deserved another.
Daryin Lewis threw 9.0 innings on one day's rest to lead No. 4 seed University of Rio Grande to a 6-1 victory over No. 1 IU Southeast in the KIAC Baseball Tournament second championship game on Saturday from Hunter Wright Stadium in Kingsport, Tenn.
Lewis, who plays third base when he doesn't pitch, limited IU Southeast to one run on only four hits in his impressive complete game. He had pitched 7.2 innings in a win over WVU Tech on Thursday night and played 18 innings of third base in between.
Lewis' outing was the second gut-check performance on the day. Hours earlier, IU Southeast star reliever Jarrod Messex pitched all nine innings of the Grenadiers' 4-1 win over Rio Grande. That forced a winner-take-all showdown in the second championship game.
It was just the second start of the year for Messex, who quieted Rio Grande's red-hot bats by limiting them to one run and scattering nine hits. It was his longest outing of the season by far as IU Southeast was on its sixth game of the week.
The second championship game had Lewis help his own cause in the decisive fourth inning. Lewis, who hits for himself when on the mound, had one of the three run-scoring hits in the inning as Rio Grande scored four times to build a 5-1 lead. Juddah Wollenburg had two runs come in on his single, and Luis Jimenez also knocked in a run with a base hit.
The RedStorm had taken a 1-0 lead when it pushed one across in the second on the back end of a first-and-third steal situation.
IU Southeast tied it up at 1-1 in the top of the fourth. The Grenadiers got two of their four hits off Lewis in that inning -- Logan Coughlin's single and Clay Benefield's double that tied it up.
Five RedStorm players had multi-hit games led by Jimenez and Lewis at the top of the order, Carlose Flores in the middle and Dylan Shockley and Wollenburg at the bottom.
In the first game of the day, it was Rio Grande's Trent Downs who got the start on two day's rest opposite Messex. Downs had pitched into the eighth inning Wednesday night in a win over Point Park.
Downs and Messex were locked in a scoreless tie through four innings before the Grenadiers finally got on the board as Downs' outing wore on. IU Southeast scored once each in the fifth and sixth on the tail end of Downs' outing and tacked on two more against the Rio bullpen in the seventh.
IU Southeast totaled 12 hits with Trent Simpson, Kyle Asher, Cody Maloon and Kyle Goodman stroking two hits each.
Downs gave up 11 hits, and although he was the beneficiary of some double plays early on that kept IU Southeast off the board, the Grenadiers eventually got the runs they needed.
Rio Grande (37-23) went 4-1 in the tournament to come out on top of the six-team, double-elimination tournament. The RedStorm earned the KIAC's automatic berth to the NAIA Baseball National Championship Opening Round to be held at campus sites May 17-20.
IU Southeast (42-13), ranked No. 19 in the NAIA Baseball Top 25 this week, will await a possible at-large berth to NAIA nationals. Qualifiers and pairings will be announced May 13 by the NAIA office.
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