EDINBURGH — Sam Meek claimed he didn’t have his best stuff, which must come as a shock to anybody who watched the Hauser senior pitch against Edinburgh on Thursday.
Meek struck out 14 and tossed a six-inning no-hitter to lead the Class A No. 6 Jets to a 12-0 win in the Mid-Hoosier Conference baseball opener for both teams.
In a performance that can only be described as “effectively wild,” Meek walked two batters and hit three others, but that wildness served him well. The Lancers put only two balls in play against him through the first five innings, and it wasn’t until the sixth that Edinburgh put a runner on third.
Nearly every other Lancers batter went down on strikes, many flailing at Meek’s devastating curve.
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“I wasn’t able to control the ball the way I wanted to, but I was still able to be effective,” said Meek, who hit three batters and walked one. “The curve was working the best for me. That was the one I got over the most consistently.”
Meek showed that dominance from the start. The lanky right-hander struck out the first four batters he faced and had 13 through five innings while keeping the Lancers off-balance.
“When Sam Meek decides to come out here, dominate the strike zone with three pitches, he can be pretty good,” Hauser coach Nate Long said. “He controlled the strike zone, he controlled both sides of the plate and that’s why he’s our No. 1.”
Edinburgh starter Zach Murphy tried his best to match Meek. He struck out six through the first three innings while walking only one. But unlike the Lancers, who couldn’t do anything with Meek, the Jets were able to get enough hits off Murphy to eventually blow the game open.
Hauser (2-1, 1-0) started the game with a bang. Sean Miller drilled the first pitch he saw off the center-field fence for a double and a batter later, Trey Johnson hammered a two-run homer to left for a 2-0 lead.
An RBI-double by Parker Eickbush in the third pushed the lead to 3-0, and a key error in the fourth opened the door for a four-run inning, punctuated by Johnson’s bases-clearing triple to make it a 7-0 game.
“A lot of people will see that score and think that it was a blowout, but it really wasn’t,” Edinburgh coach Jason Burton said. “There were three key moments in the game where we set ourselves up to get out of an inning, and we didn’t make those plays. Two runs here, three runs there and that created quite an issue for us.”
The Jets blew the game open with a five-run sixth off reliever Ryan Gaston. Johnson again came up big, lashing a two-run double, and Kameron Lawson ended up with a two-run inside-the-park home run when his towering shot to center cleared the glove of the Lancers’ Dillon Simpson.
Murphy finished with seven strikeouts and three walks in five innings. Only three of the seven runs scored against him were earned.
“Zach is a very talented pitcher, especially at the 1A level. He’s going to give a lot of kids trouble who haven’t seen that velocity and that kind of movement,” Burton said. “They had a couple of kids in their lineup who hit the ball very well and you expect that with any team. But when he was doing his job, we weren’t doing ours.”
If not for Meek’s dominating performance on the mound, Johnson would have been the star of the game for the Jets. The sophomore went 3 -for 4 with seven RBIs at the plate, falling a single short of the cycle. Miller went 3 for 3 with with a double.
