Defending 5A Champion Heritage Falls To Estero 3-2

All season, there’s been few games where American Heritage had trouble on offense. There’s been just a handful of games in which the Patriots didn’t score at least five or six runs.

You can add Friday night’s game to that list.

In a rematch of last year’s regional final that Heritage won, Estero and its dominant pitcher Zeke Pietrzyk handcuffed the Patriots 3-2 to put the Wildcats in the state final four for the first time.

Pietrzyk made effective use of his offspeed pitches, fastball, curve ball and breaking ball to confuse the Heritage hitters all game. The crafty lefty allowed just three hits to the potent Heritage lineup as he pitched a complete game.

“We didn’t make adjustments to him. He hit his spots and kept locating and changing speeds and we knew what we were doing we just didn’t do anything about it,” Heritage Manager Bruce Aven said. “You play to a one-run ballgame, and that’s what happens. It can go either way.”

Estero Manager Frank Turco said he left the game in Pietrzyk’s hands after seeing the way he was throwing.

“Zeke was just in a zone that I’ve never seen before,” Turco said. “Usually I’ll talk to the pitchers and say things, but tonight, he just had that look about him, and I didn’t say a word to him all night. And I usually am a talker to the pitcher, but he was in a zone, and when the guy is in the zone, you just leave him alone and let him do his job.”

The Patriots (25-3) came in having outscored their opponents 48-0 over the past four games.

“Our team has been an offensive team all year plus the pitching,” Aven said. “And even if we give us three runs in any game, our team should win. Our kids know they didn’t come out and do what we were supposed to do to move on to the next level, and sometimes it’s not the best and most experienced team, it’s the team who wins. It’s not sometimes. It’s the way it goes. Tonight they were better than us.”

The Wildcats (20-9) took an early advantage by scoring two runs in the top of the first. Jason Moore’s two-run single scored Ryan Keegan and courtesy runner Bay Buckley.

Heritage got one of the runs back in the bottom of the inning when CJ Chatham singled in Danny Zardon, who reached base with a walk.

“This game we had a little bit of an advantage because we had the upset advantage,” said Pietrzyk, who was on last year’s team that fell 1-0 to Heritage in the regional final to end a 25-game winning streak. “They seemed a little cocky, so we were expecting to kind of slip in there in the first inning like we did, and my job was just to make sure they didn’t score any runs after that.”

Pietrzyk faced just two batters over the minimum the rest of the game, and Heritage had just one batter reach base through the sixth. The score remained the same until the fifth when Braden Bradford scored on Keegan’s base hit to extend Estero’s lead to 3-1. David Villar singled in the bottom of the fifth but was left stranded.

Down to their final at-bats, the Patriots narrowed the margin by one when Chatham led off the bottom of the seventh with a home run to left field. But Heritage finished the inning with a putout at first and two strikeouts.

Adding to the drama of the game that featured vocal fans as well as emotionally charged dugouts, Aven was ejected in the bottom of the sixth for allegedly using profanity to react to how a pitch was called. Aven denies doing so. After a few minutes of resistance and arguing with the umpires, Aven finally walked off the field.

“I thought it was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen. I think somebody over there yelled a cuss word at the umpire and he threw me out,” Aven said. “I walked out to him and my whole thing was ‘Why are you throwing me out of a 3-1 ballgame in the regionals and you have all these people yelling at you, and you think it was me.’ And their response was ‘Well, it was somebody. You’re the head coach, so you’ve got to go.’ How are you going to make that kind of decision in a 3-1 regional game, and you didn’t hear me or see me say it?”

Although the Patriots ended the season short of their goal of a return trip to state, the loss doesn’t diminish the strong season Heritage enjoyed nor Aven’s feelings for his squad.

“We have an outstanding team, and I’ll go battle with this team anywhere,” Aven said. “Unfortunately in the game of baseball one game sends you home, and tonight we didn’t play the best game and so we go home. I love these kids, and I’d do anything for these kids. It breaks my heart that we don’t get to move because I felt we had a team that could win a championship.”

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