Wieland Ks 18 in Brewers' win

By JIM BASTIAN

Journal Sports Writer

NEW ULM -- Strikeouts and Jeremy Wieland are going hand in hand this season.

In his first outing ealier this season, Wieland fanned 14 hitters in a win at Stark. Wednesday night, the right-hander topped that as he struck out 18 batters and allowed only five hits as the New Ulm Brewers ran their Tomahawk East League mark to 5-0 with a 5-1 win over Springfield.

Wieland walked only one batter, that coming in the ninth inning when he issued a free pass to Travis Lipetzky, who ended up scoring on a Joe Holman one-out single.

Other than that, Wieland was in control of Tiger hitters as he fanned every Springfield hitter in the lineup at least once. Sam Gross was Wieland's strikeout victim four times with Blair Gostonczik whiffing three times.

John Diede took the mound loss for Springfield (1-3), going six innings and giving up five runs on six hits. Two of those hits were home runs with Troy Kamm hitting his third roundtripper of the season and Chris Peters sending one deep.

The Brewers, who return to action at 8 p.m. Friday night when they host Essig in a make-up game, struck for one run in the first inning. Brad Weber drew a one-out walk and scored on a Dan O'Brien double to right field.

In the third inning, New Ulm used a walk to Tony Burt to ignite a four-tally.

Burt's free pass was followd by a Kamm blast over the right field fence on a 3-1 offering from Deide. After Diede retired the next batter, O'Brien singled before Peters tomahawked a 2-2 pitch from Diede to almost the exact spot of Kamm's roundtripper for a 5-0 lead.

That's all Wieland would need as far as run support as he fanned five of the first six hitters in the game. The only inning that Wieland did not record a strikeout was the fourth when he got the Tigers out on two pop outs and a ground out.

But Wieland made up for it in the later innings. Of the final nine outs of the game, eight were via the strike out.

SPRINGFIELD 000 000 001--1 5 0

NU BREWERS 104 000 00x--5 6 0

W--Wieland. L--Diede. 2B--New Ulm, O'Brien; Springfield, Danielson. HRs--New Ulm, Kamm, Peters.