Butler Baseball...Davis Ketterer And The Art Of Making It Look Easy

VANDALIA - Davis Ketterer went 2-for-2 Wednesday.

He also threw five innings of shutout baseball, walked nobody, and did it all in 59 pitches.

There’s a word for that kind of afternoon. Efficient isn’t quite right. Complete is closer. But the one that keeps coming back is…easy. Not because it was easy — Sidney is a program that knows how to play — but because Ketterer made it look that way. And in baseball, that’s its own kind of skill.

The Aviators (6-0, 2-0) won 10-0. Five innings, mercy rule, done.

Their sixth win of the season, second straight Miami Valley League victory, and another afternoon where the final score told you everything and nothing at the same time — because the number doesn’t tell you how Butler got there, or what it looked like while they did.

Here’s what it looked like.

It looked like a team that doesn’t beat itself. Zero errors behind their senior pitcher. Six stolen bases — six — against a Sidney battery that never quite got comfortable. Six walks drawn by a lineup that is keenly detecting that fine line between a strike and a ball and acts accordingly. And a pitcher who threw 46 of his 59 pitches for strikes and never once put himself in trouble.

Ketterer just…pitched. And hit. And went home.

The offense did its part without any single dramatic moment to point to — which is a marker of a good team. In the first, Jackson Schilling hit a sacrifice fly and Jack Egbert grounded one out and it was 2-0 before the home crowd had settled into their seats. In the second, Gavin Leonard walked and Koby Dues hit another sacrifice fly. In the third, Ketterer — because apparently two jobs weren’t enough — singled to push it to five. The scoring came in ones and twos, inning after inning, the way water finds its way through a crack. Persistent. Inevitable. Unhurried.

But damaging nonetheless.

Sidney’s Draven Ferguson walked five in three innings. That’ll happen when a lineup has this kind of patience at the plate.

Dues drove in two. Schilling drove in two. Aidan White reached base three times. The bottom of the order — Ketterer, Leonard, Declan Scheffler — went a combined 4-for-6 and didn’t let Sidney’s pitching staff find a breath anywhere in the lineup.

Six wins. No losses. And a rotation deep enough that on any given Wednesday, the kid batting seventh is also your best pitcher of the afternoon.

Friday they go back to Sidney for the rematch. The Yellow Jackets will have had two days to find an answer.

So far, nobody has.