American Legion baseball season gets underway

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The transition from spring to summer happens extremely quickly in the high school baseball world.

Area teams were playing in the WIAA sectional tournaments last Tuesday. Two days later, the American Legion teams in the area were taking the field.

New Richmond is fielding Junior and Senior Legion teams this summer. Somerset has cut back to one team this year, a Junior Legion squad.

New Richmond’s Senior Legion team began its season on Saturday with a tournament in River Falls. The New Richmond and Somerset Junior Legion teams began action last Thursday with games in the HeartLake Border Legion League.

The New Richmond Senior team scored wins over Chippewa Falls and Wausau in the River Falls U17 tournament. New Richmond lost to River Falls and Eau Claire.

New Richmond started the tournament with a 5-0 win over Chippewa Falls. Justin Johnson threw the complete game shutout, allowing five hits. Jeremy Leavens, Zac Parfitt and Brady Gaspord had run-scoring hits in the win.

New Richmond lost to River Falls 6-5 when RF got a two-run hit in the bottom of the seventh inning. Drew Durham and Elliot Smallidge shared the pitching duties. New Richmond scored three times in the sixth to take a 5-4 lead on RBI hits from Leavens and Haydon Nelson.

New Richmond got into a pitching duel in the opening game Sunday against Eau Claire, losing 2-0. Josh Leavens pitched the complete game for New Richmond. Drew Durham had two hits in the loss.

The tournament ended on a positive note with an 8-6 win over Wausau. New Richmond trailed 5-2 before putting together consecutive three-run rallies in the fifth and sixth innings. Parfitt took care of the rally in the fifth inning, pounding a three-run homer. He also started the rally in the sixth inning with an RBI-triple. Noah Berger and Nate Mortenson followed with run-scoring singles.

Parfitt started on the mound against Wausau with Berger getting the win in relief.

This is a young Senior team, with Johnson being the only graduated senior on the roster. Coach Chad Fehrman was thrilled with the enthusiasm he saw from the team. He said the only weakness he noticed was an inability to hit off-speed pitches, which isn’t uncommon for a younger team.

With a young Senior Legion team, the New Richmond Junior team is also young. The team is made up of incoming freshmen and players from the spring baseball C team.

The Junior team started the season by losing a double-header at Unity last Thursday, 6-1 and 8-3. Coach Arron Manecke got four pitchers work in the two games as they strive to gradually build up the young arms on the team.

Nick Lubow led the New Richmond offense. He had one hit in the opener. In the second game he delivered a double and a triple. Gaspord had a double in the opening game, driving home the only run. Derek Dowd, Dane Buchman and Liam Mehls had hits in the second game and Cameron Hausman and Noah Biniek singled in the opening game.

Somerset opened the Legion season last Thursday by sweeping a pair of games at Baldwin, 10-3 and 5-4. No details were available on the games.

Games for this week include:

New Richmond Senior Legion plays at Hudson at 6 p.m. Thursday, hosts Prescott at 6:30 p.m. on Monday and plays at Altoona at 6 p.m. next Tuesday.

New Richmond Junior Legion double-header against Cumberland Thursday was postponed due to rain. the NR team hosts Amery in a double-header at 5:30 p.m. next Tuesday.

Somerset’s Legion team plays a double-header at Grantsburg on Thursday before hosting two games against Cumberland next Tuesday.

Tags: sports, baseball, tigers, prep