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Let the others run: Bedford North Lawrence baseballer Bennett likes walk-offs
Thursday, April 7, 2022

Jeff Bartlett - The Times-Mail

BEDFORD — Kaedyn Bennett doesn't try to hide his contempt for running. The three-sport Bedford North Lawrence athletes offers it up as one of the reasons why baseball is his favorite over basketball and football.

"There's a lot of running in basketball and quite a bit in football," he said with a big chuckle.

Then he gave a couple of other, more serious and sound, reasons. Bennett is certainly not slow, but neither has he ever claimed to be the world's most athletic athlete. Yet, he's very cerebral, tough and strong — all vital assets on the diamond.

"I'm more of a thinker, and baseball is a thinking man's game," he said. "And you don't have to be a freak athlete to be good in baseball. I mean, it helps, but baseball is a great neutralizer. You have to be able to hit, field and think."

Little running on walk-off hits

There's one way to get around running in baseball, and that is to rap a walk-off hit to win a game. Heck, walk is in the very description. So that's just what Bennett did Monday night, notching the first game-winning walk-off hit of his career.

With two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning in a tie game against Austin, Bennett strode to the plate. Pinch runner Maddox Ray was in scoring position after swiping second base. 

The next pitch came floating home, and Bennett was locked onto it. It was the breaking ball he had predicted in his mind — remember, it's a thinking man's game — and he stayed back on it and ripped it up the middle to score Ray and secure an important 5-4 victory for BNL's extremely young team.

"The whole night Austin had been throwing curveballs, just one after another all game," Bennett recalled. "Everybody on the team had seen it all night, so I was expecting to get one over the plate. It was a curveball that he left up, kind of hung it, and I just took it back up the middle for a hit."

Obviously, it set off euphoria, both personal for Bennett (who played the whole 2021 season with a broken thumb and suffered an 0-for-19 fate at the plate) and the team as a whole.

"That was my first walk-off ever in all these years of playing, so it felt really good," he acknowledged. "It's kind of like hitting a game-winning shot in basketball. It's just a great feeling to know you helped your team win a game. Everybody came running up and mobbed me, so it was a really cool moment."

Positivity key for inexperienced squad


This BNL team is replacing eight starters who graduated off the 2021 team, and the inexperience of the 2022 squad has already reared its head at times, mainly in terms of defensive errors and far too many walks by a youthful pitching staff. They were glaring in a 17-3 setback to Terre Haute South in the season opener, and a 13-4 loss to Evansville North in Game 3.

Yet, good signs were there as well during a 10-4 triumph over Franklin, and now the never-say-die day against Austin. So any win, any stroke of positivity, is important, and the comeback victory over Austin was a real shot in the arms, so to speak.

"That was an important win for us," Bennett said. "It shows us that our team can battle back if we don't quit. You have to get 21 outs in this game, and this teaches how to come back and win. We have to learn to win.

"The Terre Haute South game was bad, but we just put it behind us, got back to practice, started having fun and got back to work to get better."

Bennett puts out call for consistency


Bennett said the team's glaring need is to even out its performances.

"We've just got to be more consistent," he said. "We proved against Franklin that we can beat really good teams, but we have to field the ball and cut down the walks, and we have to do it consistently.

"We especially have to start fielding it better when Kline (Woodward) pitches. We've kind of let him down, and he's a really good pitcher who gets a lot of strikeouts, but also a lot of ground balls.

"We have a ton of talent on this team, but we need to play games and get experience and we have to pick up consistency."

Not many K's in Kaedyn

Bennett is off to a very solid start at the plate in 2022, hitting .273 with a walk and he's been hit by a pitch twice, the only one on the team with any of those, so his on-base percentage is .429 with only one strikeout.

He had all bad luck at the plate last season in very limited at-bats, and of course he a very big mitigating circumstance with the broken thumb he incurred in the first week of the season.

He had 25 plate appearances and couldn't by a hit in 19 official at-bats, but it should surprise no one who has seen him taking charging fouls in basketball that in that brief time he was among the team leaders in being hit by a pitch with three, while also drawing three walks with only four strikeouts.

"I didn't have any luck last year, but I played the whole season with a broken thumb," Bennett confirmed. "I broke it in the first JV game of the season, and I just wrapped it and didn't get it fixed until the season was over because I wanted to play.

"So I did the best I could."

Coach Reg rescues swing


Bennett feels he's gotten it together at the plate with the help of veteran assistant coach Reggie Joslin.

"Coach Reg has been working with me a lot on my swing and it's helping," Bennett said. "My confidence is a lot better at the plate, and my swing is a lot simpler now, so I'm making better contact."

Bennett has the feel for these walk-off things now. Now he needs to move on to hitting home runs where there's no running, just jogging, around the bases.




What's next
The Stars (2-2) are scheduled to host Rockford, Michigan Friday night in a doubleheader starting at 5 p.m.

Contact Times-Mail Sports Writer Jeff Bartlett at jeffb@tmnews.com, or on Twitter @jeffbtmnews.



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