State baseball: Rob Zolecki throws a no-hitter to send Muskego to championship game

MEQUON - Holden Reilly pitched a game for the ages for Plymouth in a state semifinal against Muskego on Friday afternoon at Kapco Park.

Rob Zolecki was even better.

Zolecki became the fifth player to throw a no-hitter at the summer state tournament, delivering a masterful performance as the Warriors advanced to the state championship game with a 1-0 victory in a rare contest that featured only one hit.

“It’s kind of surreal right now,” Zolecki said. “I give a lot of credit to my teammates behind me. They gave me a lot of confidence on the mound knowing that if I threw strikes they would make plays behind me.”

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Zolecki struck out six and allowed just two runners to reach base. The senior walked Aiden Reilly in the second and later committed a throwing error as Matt Pohl attempted to break up the no-hitter with a bunt to lead off the sixth.

The time between Zolecki’s errant throw on Pohl’s bunt and the official scorer's ruling was the closest the Muskego hurler came to losing his no-hit bid. When the number in Muskego’s error column switched from zero to one, Zolecki’s teammates made sure to give him grief.

“It could have gone either way,” Zolecki said of the error call. “(My teammates) kind of messed around with me. We were working on that all week, so I came out and made an error and they just said, ‘Nice to know you worked all week for that.’ ”

Reilly, the Panthers ace who entered the tournament with a 12-0 record 0.89 ERA, was nearly as sharp. Aided by impressive glove work behind him, including a diving catch to save a run on the warning track by Pohl in the first, Reilly allowed one hit while striking out two over six innings.

That one hit was the difference in the game.

Muskego junior Wes Kwapick stepped to the plate following a two-out walk by senior Frankie Cistaro and laced a shot into the fog in the right-center field gap. Cistaro motored around from first to score as Kwapick wound up with his fourth triple of the season.

“We drew a two-out walk there, and then Wessy with a nice at bat to find a gap,” Warriors head coach Jacob Paige said. “We did have some nice at-bats today, hit the ball hard a few times, but that was certainly the big one.”

The rest of the afternoon belonged to Zolecki, who entered with a 2.50 ERA in 39.2 innings of work and kept the Panthers guessing with a fastball-curveball mix.

“I can’t say enough about the way that he pitched today,” Paige said. “Rob, he came out throwing strikes. He had two pitches going for strikes, kept them off-balanced a little bit. The balls that they did make contact on, we played good defense on.”

Plymouth never was able to figure out Zolecki’s fastball up in the zone.

The no-hitter came in the final state semifinal in WIAA summer baseball history and was the first since Lance Painter of Nicolet threw a perfect game in 1985.

With that history in progress, none of Zolecki’s teammates wanted to be the one to say something to him in the dugout.

“No one said anything,” Zolecki said. “I looked up at the scoreboard in the bottom of the fifth and I saw that there were still no hits.”

Muskego advanced to just its second state title game in school history, where it will face top-ranked Pius XI. In the Warriors only other championship appearance, they lost in extra inning on a walk-off homer by West Bend East in one of the more memorable state finals in any sport.