With just five regular season games remaining and a 7-6 record, it looks like Lower Macungie will qualify for the Lehigh Valley Legion playoffs. This past week consisted of five games, with Lower Mac going 3-2, including a hotly contested 6-3 win over West Allentown.

All-Star pitcher Tyler Sterkenberg (3-0) started against West Allentown and got hit around for three runs in the first inning before settling in. In fact, he settled in so well that his opponents had to think of some way to get to him. They found it, temporarily.

The players in the West Allentown dugout started yelling just as Sterkenberg would go into his wind-up and it distracted Sterkenberg to the point where the Lower Macungie coaches and Sterkenberg himself asked the umpire to do something about it. The umpires ruled that since the players weren't yelling directly at Sterkenberg or yelling his name, there wasn't anything they could do to stop the practice.

"It was kind of frustrating and annoying, but it is what it is and I just tried to block it out the best that I could and throw strikes," said Sterkenberg, who threw a complete game, allowing five hits and six walks while striking out 10 hitters.

Manager Mark Sterkenberg called his players together after West Allentown started attempting to disrupt his team and challenged them to turn the antics into something they could rally around.

"I look at that as a classless move," said coach Sterkenberg. "We will never do that; that's just not the way that we play. I told the guys, 'let's take this personal now.' This was a personal thing to me, because they were trying to throw him off his game and we just went out and got some runners on base and then scored some runs and that's how we dealt with it."

The fact that the younger Sterkenberg was able to give Lower Macungie a complete game was a boost to the pitching staff. The night before their game with West Allentown, Lower Macungie played four and a half innings against Coplay before rain washed away the game, costing the team a strong outing in what was a 7-2 lead. That rain-out combined with a full schedule over the next week, including a double-header this past Sunday, meant that it was important to get a strong outing from Sterkenberg.

"We needed Mark to go five or six innings and when they started to get a little bit chippy, it sort of gave him an adrenaline boost," said coach Sterkenberg.

Offensively, Lower Macungie battled back from an early 3-0 deficit, scoring two runs in the bottom of the first on an RBI double by Jesus Camilo and a sacrifice fly by Luini Camilo.

Lower Mac tied the game in the third when Jared Miller worked a bases-loaded walk and went on to take the lead in the fifth thanks to an error and some heads-up baserunning.

Lower Macungie got two insurance runs in the bottom of the sixth, the first coming on a sacrifice fly by Francis Camilo and the second on an RBI single by Luini Camilo.

Overall, Lower Mac picked up seven hits and took advantage of seven walks and two errors in the win over West Allentown.

Lower Macungie plays rival Emmaus (4-7) Wednesday night (June 26) at Emmaus Community Park before home games on Thursday against Fullerton (5-5) and Sunday against Salisbury (8-3). Lower Mac wraps up its schedule next week with two road games against league-leading Southern Lehigh (10-3) and Coplay (5-7).