Baseball: Max Larsen leads Lyons to summer title
Max Larsen won MVP awards each of the past two seasons for Lyons’ lower-level baseball programs.
On Thursday night, the rising junior showed he’s ready for the big stage as well.
Larsen pitched five-hit ball over six innings and drove in three runs as Lyons beat Joliet Catholic 7-3 at Benedictine University in Lisle to win the unofficial summer state title.
Tourney MVP Mike Lorenz and Tom Prescott added two hits each for the Lions (32-4-1), who won the Illinois High School Baseball Coaches Association’s Phil Lawler Summer Classic for the fourth time since 2002. Earlier in the day, Lyons edged Jacobs 5-4 in eight innings and Joliet Catholic beat St. Laurence 7-4 in semifinal action.
Larsen worked out of a two-on, none-out jam in the first inning and survived a three-run second that gave the Hilltoppers (19-4) a brief 3-2 lead. From the third through the sixth, he gave up no runs on two hits.
“I don’t overpower a lot of people so I was going to try to hit my spots and mix up the speeds,” said Larsen, a 5-foot-8, 150-pound lefty.
A talk with assistant coach Andy Miller after the second inning got Larsen on the right track. Miller noticed Larsen’s tempo was off. “I had to work fast, because that’s what I like to do,” Larsen said. “I started throwing strikes and I got zoned in.”
He never lost focus at the plate. Larsen’s first hit of the game, an RBI single to center in the first, made it 2-0 and his second, an RBI single to right in the third, tied the score 3-3. Sam Cybulski’s groundout drove in Sam Heilenbach with the go-ahead run and the Lions scored on an error to complete a three-run inning and put Lyons up 5-3.
That was enough of a cushion for Larsen.
“He’s just a competitor,” Lyons coach George Ushela said. “He gets on the mound, he’s got some presence and he does a nice job.”
So does the Lyons defense.
“We hit some balls pretty hard,” Joliet Catholic coach Jared Voss said. “Lyons’ second baseman [Cybulski] was everywhere and that left fielder [Jim Pavlik] made some plays down the line.”
Prescott, who drove in a run in the first with a fielder’s choice, and Larsen had RBI singles in the seventh. Then Ushela brought in hard-throwing senior Keith Lehmann for the seventh, and he worked a scoreless, hitless inning to nail down another title for the Lions.
“It’s a special thing,” said Lorenz, whose brother Brian was the summer state tourney MVP when Lyons won its last title in 2006.
Brock Pluth went 1-for-2 with two walks and a two-run single in the second for Joliet Catholic, which was the only Class 3A team to make the eight-team summer state field.
Contributing: Tim O’Brien