Hot Stove Baseball: North Ridgeville starts scoring, doesn't stop in win over Fairview Park

ALLIANCE — It's not how you start, it's how you finish. That was the motto Saturday for the North Ridgeville Rangers in the Ohio Hot Stove Class I state semifinal at Butler Rodman Park. After falling behind by three runs early, the Rangers came storming back to score 12 unanswered runs on their way to a 14-4, five-inning win over Fairview Park. Once North Ridgeville's bats came alive, the runs came in bunches as it scored five times each in the second and third innings to open a 10-3 lead. "Sometimes we're just not ready to go. We get down by a couple and then we just start going," Rangers starting pitcher Hudson Jarrett said. "Once we turn it on we start scoring a lot." Since an opening loss to Avon 3 Outs Orange, North Ridgeville has won 17 games in a row and scored nine or more in all but one of those. The Rangers will have a chance to avenge their only loss today at 11 a.m. when they face 3 Outs for the state title. "This was a goal we had at the beginning of the year and it's just good to do something they set out to do," Rangers coach Sean Fleming said. "We've been battling adversity all year. We manage to get down in games but we don't get down on ourselves, we tend to strike back." In the third inning the Rangers showed they could hit for power as Howie Tabar had a home run, Dominik Rumancik had a triple and Bryson Mollenkamp added a double. The final blow for North Ridgeville was inflicted by Mason Lawrence, whose fifth-inning double scored Mollenkamp and Jarrett to give the Rangers a 10-run lead to end the game by mercy rule. "It felt really good to hit that double to go to the state finals," Lawrence said. "I didn't know we only needed two to end the game. "I'm really happy we're playing for the state championship. We have to come out and take it to Avon." Jarrett, Tabar and Mollenkamp pitched for North Ridgeville. "Throughout the year we've learned from all the little mistakes we've made," Fleming said. "All year our goal has been to move on to the next play. We're going to make mistakes, the objective is to move on because you might have a ball hit to you the next play and you have another chance to turn an inning around." The game showed how much North Ridgeville's defense has improved over the season. In its regular-season game against Fairview, it allowed 10 runs in a two-run victory. Fairview tried valiantly to stage a late-game rally as Seamus Birt hit a two-out solo home run in the fifth inning to make it 12-4. The Warriors then loaded the bases before Mollenkamp came in and got a strikeout to end the inning. Carter Meddles scored two runs for North Ridgeville. which scored two or more runs in every inning except the first. Contact Todd Shapiro at (440) 329-7135 or ctsports@chroniclet.com.