Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Alex Sogard pitched in the minors, started his career at Wright State as a pitching coach and oversaw that phase of the game for the first six years of his seven-year stint as head coach.
As one player after another came through on the mound for the Raiders in the Horizon League tourney, Sogard was beaming like a proud papa — not that he wouldn’t have been just as happy winning the title with a bevy of slugfests.
“Holy cow!” he exclaimed in the joyous aftermath Saturday at Nischwitz Stadium. “I KNEW we could do it.
“That’s the first championship game where it’s been tight. There’s been a number of years where we’ve been fortunate to be scoring a lot of runs and the other team isn’t. But the pitching guy in me will take a 2-0 game any day of the week — though it probably will take a few years off my life.”
The Raiders (38-19) dropped into the loser’s bracket but prevailed in three straight elimination games to snag their sixth crown in the last eight HL tourneys and their league-high 11th overall.
They gave up just five runs in that trio of games with their season on the line, including a 2-0 win over Milwaukee in the finals when freshman reliever J.J. Thompson was all but unhittable.
