Jack Majcher was a baseball jack-of-all-trades this summer. He was master of the mound Monday.
Majcher struck out five and allowed four hits in the Naperville Baseball Association Senior League Division I championship game at DuPage River Park.
He led a team sponsored by Gerald Subaru past the Marianjoy-sponsored team 8-0.
Majcher, a recent graduate of Naperville North, had only thrown four or five innings prior to Monday for a team deep in pitching. He was the right player for the job in the biggest game, coaxing five ground balls.
“Wherever you needed him, he would play,” Gerald Subaru coach Paul LaScala said of Majcher. “He mixed it up, changed speeds a lot, and he just kept them off-balance.”
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For Gerald Subaru, it was history repeating itself.
Last year, the team battled back through the loser’s bracket to beat Marianjoy twice for the title. Majcher was one of five seniors back from a group that won the hard way again.
Gerald Subaru dropped a 6-5, 10-inning game to Marianjoy in the second round of the league playoffs, then won 7-3 in the first game Monday to force the winner-take-all final.
“It was our time again, I guess,” LaScala said. “Things just clicked for us at the end.”
The Naperville Baseball Association, in its 61st season, has two leagues: a Senior League for high school students and a Junior League for middle schoolers. A double-elimination tournament follows a 14-game regular season.
Gerald Subaru, second to Marianjoy during the regular season, never trailed in either of the final two games.
In the first game, Gerald Subaru scored two runs in the first inning on Majcher’s single, Matt Pillatsch’s RBI triple and Charlie Weidenbach’s sacrifice fly. Weidenbach, a Benet graduate, also homered.
That early lead boosted Pillatsch, a Naperville North graduate who pitched a complete game.
In the championship game, Gerald Subaru scored two runs in the first inning, two in the fifth, two in the sixth and two in the seventh. Chris LaScala scored three runs, while Weidenbach doubled in a run in the first.
“That early lead gave us some confidence,” Paul LaScala said.
Marianjoy started its season 6-4, then got red hot, winning seven straight. In the extra-inning thriller over Gerald Subaru earlier in the tournament, Dan Bumpus walked, Matt Casey singled and Michael Irwin doubled in the game-winner.
Those three were the lone seniors for a team that drafted seven kids and didn’t have one play for a high school team.
“We lost a lot of key players from last year,” Marianjoy coach Joe Ariola said. “We had a great group of kids who were very athletic and just loved to play baseball. This team was very aggressive and stole a ton of bases.”
Ariola didn’t focus on a bittersweet finish.
“We maybe lost the championship, but it was a great season,” Ariola said. “To me it was all about the journey. Having a team half turned over, we had to jell, and it was a lot of run.”
Gerald Subaru’s championship capped a successful three-year run that started with a second-place finish in 2014.
The roster was an interesting mix. Chris LaScala and Gavin Bougadis were four-year players, catcher Wyatt Kloos played three.
Weidenbach hung up his cleats in high school to focus on football — he will play at Dayton this fall — but was convinced to give baseball one more go. Jack Barry, from Naperville North, will play soccer at Bowling Green.
“It was a nice combination of kids growing up,” Paul LaScala said.
Joshua Welge is a freelance writer for the Naperville Sun.