Mt. Airy Stars look to rebound after tough loss

Posted 6/12/17

Evan O'Leary-Lee of the Mt. Airy Stars slides into third base in the midst of a rough 9-2 loss to Loudenslager. (Photo by Jonathan Vander Lugt) by Jonathan Vander Lugt After a 9-2 loss to …

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Mt. Airy Stars look to rebound after tough loss

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Evan O'Leary-Lee of the Mt. Airy Stars slides into third base in the midst of a rough 9-2 loss to Loudenslager. (Photo by Jonathan Vander Lugt)

by Jonathan Vander Lugt

After a 9-2 loss to Loudenslager that featured numerous errors, baserunning blunders and frustrating lapses in concentration, the way that the Mt. Airy Stars performed on Sunday could be described as, at the very best, rough.

Jeff Istvan, the team’s third base coach and the father of Sam—one of the Stars’ elder statesmen—hung his head, shrugged his shoulders a bit, chuckled and cracked a brief, resigned grin.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was.”

The team rapped out just three hits in seven innings, rendering the five walks they drew largely useless. Outside of a rare handful swings, few balls left the infield.

Meanwhile, Jack Gontowski struggled off the mound. The righty, who played his high school ball downtown at Friends Select, fought command issues from the get-go. Gontowski’s delivery requires a lot of coordination—he throws at a very high angle to gain leverage—and on a hot day (90-some degrees at game time), that can be tough to repeat.

Without a repeatable delivery, command is often elusive. Loudy tallied nine hits and three walks in his four innings of work. Jaron Ellison took over in relief, until a sequence of concentration issues forced his benching.

In the fourth, when the Mt. Airy deficit was just four runs, he got carelessly aggressive on third after a Nate Teagle walk. Loudenslager back-picked and caught him in a run-down. Later, in the sixth, he failed to run out a grounder to short. The sun, setting down the third-base line, kept the first-baseman from making the play.

Had Ellison hustled, he would have been safe. Instead, he walked back to the dugout, clearly frustrated in what ended up being an apt summation of the kind of day Mt. Airy had.

The Stars—and Ellison—will bounce back. Mt. Airy is a good team, and everyone’s entitled to a bad day every now and again.

The problem was that on Sunday everything snowballed. A couple of unearned runs in the first inning led to a morose start, and the tone continued throughout.

“When it’s 90 degrees like this, what I’ve found, is that when you make a mistake, it seems worse than it is,” Istvan said. “You feel the heat (literally) a little more when you get behind. It’s easy to be lethargic when things aren’t going well to begin with.”

“We’re a better team than this,” Istvan said. “The message was just that we have to turn the page. We didn’t hit well enough, we didn’t pitch well enough and we didn’t play defense well enough. It was just a team loss.”

“It’s a long season and you have games like this every once in a while,” he continued.

For what it’s worth, Mt. Airy beat Loudenslager 8-5 last week, and will get another crack at it Wednesday.

“These kids are teenagers,” Istvan said. They’ll move on.

Loudenslager finished with 12 hits on the day, to go along with seven more free passes. The only inning that it didn’t score a run was the second.

For Mt. Airy, Colin Brown provided the team’s lone bright spot. He poked a solo home run over the fence in right, and finished the day 1-for-3. Elsewhere, Teagle finished 1-for-2 with a walk, and Isaac Spear tallied the team’s other hit.

“They’ll be able to turn the page. Luckily, in this league, the games happen pretty quickly,” he said. “Tomorrow, we’ll be right back at it against Bustleton.”

Weather permitting, Mt. Airy will have played four more games by this time next week, and this loss will be far in the rearview mirror.

“I fully expect them to respond well,” Istvan said.

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