Frontier League baseball: Cross leads Belleville Henderson to "D" Division championship

May 20—COPENHAGEN — Brittan Cross left the pitcher's mound to catch a fly ball for the final out, then all the emotion he had channeled through a complete-game gem poured out as the Belleville Henderson baseball team celebrated its long-awaited championship.

Cross tallied 13 strikeouts in a two-hit shutout, Cayden Randall delivered a two-run single during a breakthrough fifth inning, and the top-seeded Panthers beat the No. 2 Lyme Lakers, 4-0, in the Frontier League "D" Division playoff final Saturday at Copenhagen High School.

Belleville Henderson (14-2) swept the division regular-season and playoff titles — claiming its first outright championship since 2001 — and extended its winning streak to 13 games.

Last year, the Panthers and Lakers advanced to the "D" Division title game that was ultimately rained out, and they were declared playoff co-champions. Lyme won the 2022 regular-season crown.

"The feeling is amazing because our team has worked very hard to win this," Cross said afterward. "We've been talking about it since the beginning, we said we were going to win this because last year, we were a co-champion, and we were not sharing this year."

Belleville Henderson is now poised for a top seed in the Section 3 Class D playoffs when pairings are unveiled Sunday. Opening-round sectional games are set to begin as early as Monday.

"We may not be the most finesse group, but they've got the heart of a lion," said Panthers coach Paul Gibbs, a 1972 Belleville graduate. "They'll play everything as hard as they can, and when they go up there, they know we'll make mistakes, but we'll correct them. There has never been a die in them."

Cross led the charge in limiting Lyme to just two hits and a pair of walks across seven electric innings.

After allowing a leadoff single to Alex Radley in the top of the first inning, Cross faced just two batters above the minimum.

Jon LaFontaine doubled to lead off the fourth inning for Lyme then stole third base, but Cross struck out three straight batters swinging to maintain the scoreless tie. He retired the next nine batters consecutively to finish the win, and 12 of his 13 strikeouts came via missed swings.

Cross secured his seventh win of the season and surpassed 100 strikeouts, upping his total to 107 for the season.

"He stood up for us today," Gibbs said. "He knew that if he was on that he would limit any hits, and what we talked about going in was walks. ... The plan today was to make them hit it and put the ball in play so that we could make the out, and we stayed to the plan and that worked."

Lyme junior Evan Froelich surrendered four runs on five hits and tallied 11 strikeouts in six innings. He held up his end of the expected pitcher's duel but was done in by a four-run fifth inning.

Belleville Henderson sophomore Josh Hemingway was hit by a pitch to lead off the frame and was moved to second on a sacrifice bunt by Evan Howard. Brandon Dodge and Cross followed with back-to-back singles to load the bases before Randall ripped a two-run single to take the 2-0 advantage.

"In my head I just wanted to hit the ball, I was not letting myself strike out," Randall said. "No matter where the pitch was or what it was, I was making sure I put the ball in play."

Chris Vaughn and Caleb Williams drove in runs on consecutive at-bats to push the edge to 4-0 by the end of the fifth inning.

"We trusted each other," Randall said. "Evan (Howard) put down that bunt, that was big, and then after that we just started hitting. That just gave us energy."

Froelich also reached 100 Ks for the campaign and will enter sectionals with 102 punch-outs for Lyme (12-4).

Cross and Froelich, who played summer baseball together on a Syracuse-area travel team, entered the matchup as the top two strikeout leaders in Section 3 Class D, per the league stats website.

Their respective earned-run averages — Froelich entered at 1.75 and Cross at 2.09 — are the top marks in Class D among hurlers with at least 40 innings pitched entering the Section 3 playoffs.

The Panthers and Lakers split their regular-season series and Belleville Henderson won the regular-season title by one game.