Offensive explosion lifts Wingnuts out of funk

At the end of the night, the scoreboard showed that the Wichita Wingnuts had broken out of their slump. But the win lacked radiance a 13-run offensive performance that ended a four-game losing streak should carry.

Maybe it was because the pitchers were pounded at times, or the field was sloppy in others. But the team certainly did not lack the bats.

Wichita, in its return home after a six-game road trip, topped Sioux City, 13-11, to win its first game in five tries to avoid tying a franchise-high losing streak of five games.

“We just needed to get back into the win column, and we did that,” manager Kevin Hooper said. “We’ve been scuffling. We need to get on a little run here. We’ve been in a little funk, and it’s just one of those things, that’s baseball for you.”

The Wingnuts' funk was mostly attributed to poor situational hitting and rough late pitching as they were swept in Kansas City, but both of those things were working on Monday night. After leaving 10 or more men on base in every game in Kansas City, Hooper sat down and had a talk with his team before the Sioux Falls series about situational hitting.

“We’ve been getting hits,” said third baseman T.J. Mittelstaedt, who had a solo homer in the third inning. “Today we got them with guys on.”

Hooper’s talk seemed to do its job. The four two-out runs the Wingnuts scored on Monday were the difference in the game.

“Whenever your manager comes in and talks to you about something, that should be your number one priority,” said first baseman Dustin Geiger, who went 4-for-5 with a pair of doubles, a home run, and five RBIs.

The Wingnuts got out to a 5-0 lead in the first three innings. After Matt Padgett brought home a run with an RBI single in the second, Mittelstaedt hit his sixth homer of the year — a solo bomb to the left-center gap.

Despite operating with a five-run lead, Wingnuts starting pitcher Charlie Lowell was slammed in the fourth inning. Lowell gave up eight runs — and Wichita’s lead — on nine hits, including seven consecutive singles to lead off the inning. He bounced back with a three-up, three-down inning in the fifth before being relieved by Al Yevoli in the sixth.

“When you only have a 22-man roster, sometimes your starters have to go a little extra ways, and we wanted him to go through the fifth,” Hooper said. “It happens in a hurry, and it did that hurry. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and all of a sudden they have eight.”

While Lowell stumbled on the mound, the bats stayed consistent. From the second to the seventh inning, the Wingnuts brought home at least one run in every offensive inning to keep pace with Sioux Falls. At the head of that offense was first baseman Geiger, who returned to the four-spot after a stint in the eight-spot over the past couple of weeks.

“We moved some things around, and it worked out,” Hooper said. “We’ve got to do it every once in a while, especially when you’re struggling… (Geiger) came through tonight.”

Geiger put the Wingnuts up 12-11 in the bottom of the sixth with a two-RBI double which one-bounced and hit the fence, then added one more run in the seventh with an RBI single. He was only a triple away from hitting for the cycle as he pushed his batting average to .353 on the season.

“(I’ve changed) my mental approach,” Geiger said. “Just making sure I stick to a mental approach and what gets me from at-bat to at-bat and game-to-game, and just not giving in to pitchers.”

Though the Wingnuts are out of the slump for tonight, the slump still looms. The next few games will be important in digging the team out of the mental whole its dug itself into the last couple of series.

“It’s only one day, but we feel like we can keep doing this,” Mittelstaedt said. “We feel like we can do this, and we can get onto a roll.”

This story was originally published June 23, 2015 at 2:44 PM with the headline "Offensive explosion lifts Wingnuts out of funk."