Sep 10, 2018 4 min read

The opening round of the Frontier League playoffs came down to starting pitching.

Baseball always comes down to starting pitching, right?

Washington and the Joliet Slammers advanced to the best-of-5 championship series that begins tonight (7:05) at Wild Things Park by getting good starting pitching and a few timely hits in the opening round.

“That’s what you expect it to be. There are not a lot of runs in playoff games,” said Washington manager Gregg Langbehn.

The Wild Things swept Evansville in three games. In two of the games, Washington’s starting pitcher did not allow an earned run. Evansville mustered only four runs (three earned) in 19 innings against Wild Things starters.

Joliet, meanwhile, pulled off an impressive series win in five games over West Division champion River City. The Slammers lost Game 3 by a lopsided 16-3 score when Joliet starting pitcher Scot Hoffman lasted only 2 1/3 innings. The loss put the Slammers on the brink of elimination.

The Slammers, however, won Games 4 and 5 and received stellar starting pitching in the process. Nate Antone, a Vandergrift native and former pitcher at West Virginia University, made 35 relief appearances without a start for the Slammers during the regular season but got the call to pitch Game 4. All Antone did was take a no-hitter into the eighth inning and strike out 10. Still, Joliet trailed 1-0 and was three outs away from elimination when third baseman Danny Zardon hit a two-run homer in the ninth inning off River City’s all-league closer Cody Mincey to give the Slammers a 2-1 win and force Game 5.

Liam O’Sullivan pitched 6 2/3 shutout innings in Game 5 Sunday night and Zardon hit a three-run homer as the Slammers won 6-0 to advance and meet Washington in the finals.

The Wild Things will start lefty Thomas Dorminy in Game 1. That comes as no surprise because Dorminy was 9-5 with a 2.45 ERA during the regular season and was named the Frontier League’s Pitcher of the Year. Dorminy allowed one unearned run over seven innings in the series opener against Evansville.

Joliet had one of the top starting rotations and ranked second in the league with 46 quality starts – at least six innings pitched and no more than three earned runs allowed. The Slammers will start rookie right-hander Daren Osby (7-3, 3.50) in Game 1.

Game 2 is expected to match Washington’s Chase Cunningham (7-6, 4.45) against Hoffman (8-5, 3.51).

“Runs will be hard to come by and that’s the way it should be,” Langbehn said. “They’ll be tense games.”

Washington and Joliet each finished the regular season with a 54-42 record and tied for the East Division title. The Wild Things garnered the top seed in the playoffs by winning the season series against the Slammers, 7-5.

“We have to figure out how to score off their starters,” Langbehn said. “Osby we’ve seen one time here and Hoffman we’ve faced four times but we’ve never really figured him out. Starting pitching is the strength of their team. We’re going to have to scratch and claw for everything we get.”

Starting pitching wasn’t always Washington’s strength but has become one. The Wild Things’ starters had a combined ERA of 5.75 through July 24. Since then, a period of 35 regular-season games and three postseason contests, the ERA of the Wild Things’ starting pitchers is only 3.21 and it’s no coincidence that Washington has a 25-13 record in that span.

Much of that success has to do with the addition of starting pitchers Michael Austin and Dillon Sunnafrank, among others. Austin threw six shutout innings in Washington’s 5-0 win over Evansville in Game 3 last Friday.

“That area had to get better for us to be in this position,” Langbehn said. “We needed more length out of our starters and more depth in the bullpen. We added some starters, Jake Eaton got healthy and we signed Jesus Balaguer, which helped our bullpen.

“For us to be in this position, those things had to happen. It doesn’t matter how well you hit, to get to this point in the season, you have to pitch well.”

Extra bases

Washington is seeking its first Frontier League championship. The Wild Things will be making their third appearance in the finals, having lost to Richmond in 2002 and Windy City in 2007. The manager of that Washington team in 2002 was Jeff Isom, who is Joliet’s manager. … In the 12 regular-season games against the Wild Things, Joliet’s team batting average was only .187 but the Slammers hit seven home runs and stole 14 bases. Four of the home runs were hit by Justin Garcia, who played for Washington in 2016. … Joliet has one FL championship, in 2011.