The season came to a close Friday evening for the Pella baseball team. The Dutch fell in a road loss to Centerville 10-3 in the opening round of Class 3A Substate 6, as heard on KRLS3.

The Big Reds quickly got the scoring underway with three runs in the bottom of the first. Pella responded in the second when Tanner Dunsbergen drove in Drew Hillman to get to within 3-1.

Centerville made it 4-1 after three, but after that is when the Big Reds did the bulk of their damage. Centerville scored three runs apiece in the fifth and sixth innings to take command. Pella made it interesting with two runs in their half of the sixth, but the tradition-rich Centerville program was able to get one game closer to its fourth consecutive state tournament appearance. Head Coach Jesse Jablonski says that his team was unable to recover from a slow start.

“We let them get settled in, and we just didn’t find enough barrels tonight. We made a few mistakes early defensively, gave up a couple of walks, made a couple of errors early on, we kind of dug ourselves a hole early on. Our offense has been up and it’s been down, it’s been all over. We’re not really a team that’s built to come back from a big deficit. So digging ourselves a hole, that hurt.”

The Dutch were held to just four base hits in the game, with one each from Nick Grandia, Nick DeJong, Aidan Pollock and Tanner Dunsbergen. Four Pella pitchers combined to give up 13 hits and four walks with only two strikeouts.

Pella’s season comes to a close with a record of 9-11. Six seniors depart the program.