They play each other every year – or they have since Brad Arlinghaus took the baseball head coaching job at Conner in 2014.
Not that Conner shares all that much of a tradition with the storied eight-time state titlist Archbishop Moeller, the best baseball program in Cincinnati in recent years, and the best in all of Ohio this year where it’s ranked No. 1 with just a single loss in 17 games.
By the time Moeller had taken an 11-1 lead in the fifth inning, the only thing these teams shared – despite Conner challenging for a top spot in Northern Kentucky – was this baseball field carved out of an undulating Hebron pasture.
Here’s one way to look at it. Conner has one alum – pitcher Jason Johnson – who made it to the major leagues where he had a workmanlike 11-year career with eight teams – including the Reds. And with Type 1 diabetes, he did earn the distinction as the first major leaguer to play with an insulin pump.
Moeller has had more than 30 players make it to the majors with two – Barry Larkin and Ken Griffey Jr. – making it to the Hall of Fame. Moeller alums are everywhere in baseball. Philip Diehl, who came up to the Reds this week and pitched two scoreless innings in relief, is a 2012 grad. Diehl is playing for another ex-Crusader, David Bell, who led Moeller to a 1989 state title and is now the Reds manager and the son of major leaguer Buddy Bell, also Moeller grad.
“They have six Division 1 players,” Arlinghaus said of this year’s Moeller team. “But we didn’t roll over . . . and we could have.”
Should have, maybe, to get this one over. When you give up a grand slam from Kelan Daniel in the second inning and the only reason you didn’t give another one up in the fourth to Nathan Manley is that the guy on third scored on a wild pitch right before the big blast, it’s probably not your day.
But no one told the Cougars it was time to pack it in before they put up six runs in the fifth to make it 11-7 thanks to the bat of sophomore Rex Richter, who was batting .296 coming into this one before finishing with his first-ever four for four. And then senior catcher Briggs Yuenger added his three for four with a double down the left-field line, the hardest-hit ball of the night for Conner.
“You could have easily rolled over,” Arlinghaus told his 20-4 team when they got down by 10 runs. But they didn’t. “I’ll take a gritty team every time.”
Gritty or not, the Cougars couldn’t stop giving a good Moeller team extra chances on the way to what finished up as a 15-8 loss.
“But eight of those were free bases,” Arlinghaus said of the eight bases on balls and hit-by-pitch base runners for the Crusaders who eventually scored as three Cougar pitchers just could not find the plate.
“You can’t do that against Moeller,” Arlinghaus said. “You can’t do that against any team in Northern Kentucky. Take those away and it’s 8-7.”
Catcher Yuenger wishes they could take them away. If he’d have been given points for degree of difficulty like they do divers for all the balls he had to dive for, he’d be heading to the Olympics.
“Very high,” he said of how to put a number on how difficult his day was. “But that’s the only off game our pitchers have had,” he said.
Richter realized what he would have to do as a result. “We knew we couldn’t fall off (down by double digits), we had to get our dugout going.” Then the offense.
Which is where Richter came in. He’d hit three straight singles – all on curve balls – and was sure when he came up with the chance to make it four for four, “they weren’t going to throw me another curve ball.”
But in the overcast dark gray haze in a game that took two hours and fifty minutes, how he saw that final fast ball in the seventh inning is a mystery. But give him this, he was looking for it.
Now the Cougars, who started 16-1 only to lose three – two by a run each in District games to Ryle and Cooper – the last eight days, have to figure out how to get themselves going the way they were when they beat Beechwood – the only Northern Kentucky team to do so.
“We’re tired, I’m tired,” Arlinghaus said. “We’re heading into May. This is the time we just have to rally around each other.”
It’s also why you play a team like Moeller, to learn to compete when against the toughest competition you can find.
“Our district is so tough to get out of and the Ninth Region may be as tough to get out of as any in the state except for the 11th (Lexington),” Arlinghaus said of his rationale for keeping the Crusaders on the schedule.
You play Moeller to get ready to play the likes of Ryle and Cooper, Covington Catholic, Dixie Heights and Beechwood, he said.
With a lineup that’s “fantastic all the way around,” Yuenger said after a close look at Moeller, “all nine batters.”
