The last area baseball team to start up their road to state is Washington and the Demons open the class 3A playoffs this evening at Dick Sojka Memorial Field when they welcome Clear Creek-Amana for a first round game. 

The Demons closed the regular season 15-13 after losses to start the week against Pella 4-1 and Solon 5-1. Junior Lucas Kroll has led the team at the dish with a .443 average and 26 RBI. Reece Mayer has brought in the most runs with 31 RBI. Twelve different pitchers have seen action on the hill so far with Kole Williams leading the way with a 2.50 ERA in 33 innings of work. The Clippers are 15-16 and finished third in the WaMac-West Division with a 12-12 league mark. They lost their last three regular season games including a 5-1 defeat to Grinnell on Monday. A team that hits for a .262 average is led by Parker Smith with a .407 BA and Jack Downes has brought in 31 runs. Brock Reade is the ace with a 2.16 ERA in 32 frames on the bump.

Head Coach Nathan Miller tells KCII Sports the keys to a long postseason run. “Number one is energy. Any team in sports play at their top level when they bring the energy. The second thing is we need to communicate on the field. The games that we play well is when we communicate well and on the flip side usually we struggle when we don’t talk as much. Lastly, we need to throw strikes. High school baseball starts with pitching and we can’t give away any free passes.” These two squads met up last week in Tiffin, but only got one inning in before the game was called with the score tied 1-1. 

The winner of tonight’s game will face either Davenport Assumption (23-13) or Keokuk (4-29) on Monday. Listen to all of the action on AM 1380 FM 102.5 FM 106.1 KCII, kciiradio.com, or our free Mobile Apps with the Washington HyVee Pregame Show beginning at 6:30 p.m. and first pitch set for 7 p.m. in Washington.