Fifty years ago …

Fifty years ago this month, No. 3-ranked Terre Haute North proved it was No. 1 in the state in high school baseball.

At the perfect time, the end of the season.

Coincidentally, no Vigo County boys team in any sport has won an IHSAA state title since. These Patriots lost only two regular-season games — 3-1 to West Vigo and 7-5 to Bloomington North — and featured two undefeated right-handed pitchers who batted from the left side.

An informal team shot that ran in the Terre Haute North High School yearbook of the 1974 Patriots, who won the IHSAA state baseball title. Head coach Don Jennings is No. 18 (far right). This photo was taken after North captured the sectional championship at West Vigo.

They were senior Nate Mills and junior Tim Mundy. Plus, there were plenty of other clutch hitters. Remember, this was decades before Indiana implemented the class system for athletics, aluminum bats were a relatively new piece of equipment that not every player used and North-South regular-season baseball clashes took place at Valle Field. That era probably doesn’t seem real to Millennials.

On the first weekend of June 1974, coach Don Jennings’ Patriots — only in their third year of existence since the consolidation of Garfield and Gerstmeyer — knocked off Terre Haute Schulte 10-2, Terre Haute South 8-0 (with Mills twirling a two-hit shutout and second baseman Curt Phillips homering) and West Vigo 5-0 (with Mundy pitching a three-hit shutout and homering and shortstop Gary McCabe belting two homers) to seize the sectional title on the Vikings’ diamond (now named Dick Ballinger Field).

That catapulted Jennings’ squad into the Brazil Regional the next weekend at Forest Park, where it beat the host Red Devils — and avenged a 1973 regional loss — by a 3-1 score. Mills tossed another two-hitter. In the regional championship game that night, the Pats blanked Clinton 6-0 behind Mundy’s one-hitter to improve their record to 21-2.

Next came the Lafayette Semistate on June 15 at Loeb Stadium — as other top teams were being eliminated from the state tournament — North outscored Brownsburg 5-1 as Mills hurled a four-hitter, catcher Fay Spetter homered and Phillips delivered three hits. Then the Patriots punched their ticket to the state finals by edging Logansport 4-2 that night as Mundy struck out 12 batters in a four-hitter, Mills went 3 for 4 with a triple and McCabe also tripled.

State-finals action got postponed a couple days because of rain. But finally Monday, June 24, arrived as the day … and again they were playing in Lafayette’s Loeb Stadium.

In the state semifinals, Jennings’ group faced a tough Evansville Memorial club that would not go down easily. With Mundy uncharacteristically struggling on the mound, Jennings reportedly considered bringing in Mills from center field to relieve Mundy. The Patriots (and Mundy) survived, however, and won 6-4 to advance to that night’s IHSAA championship game against Indianapolis Marshall, which entered the final four with a 23-10 record.

The competitive portion of that matchup lasted all of one inning, even after the usually dependable Phillips and Mundy led off with outs. Highlighting the five-run outburst were right fielder John Winniski’s two-run triple and McCabe’s two-run roundtripper to left field. Mills proceeded to pitch a four-hitter and the Patriots emerged with a 12-1 victory for the state championship and a 25-2 mark. “This is undoubtedly the best team I’ve ever coached,” Jennings told Terre Haute Tribune sports editor Jimmy Claus immediately after the contest.

Brad Baughman was a junior reserve on the ’74 Patriots, managing one hit in four at-bats all season. But that one hit came in the seventh inning against Indy Marshall when Jennings practically emptied the bench. Baughman knocked in a run with a single and later scored one of their dozen runs.

“That made me feel like I was a contributor to a [state] championship team,” Baughman said this past Saturday during a 50-year reunion for the team at Lost Creek Grove.

That anniversary gathering proved to be a huge success. Assistant coach Herschell Allen, Jennings’ righthand man in 1974 who later became Shakamak’s head baseball and basketball coach, showed up. He’s 83 and living most of the year in Brazil (while spending four months in Florida).

Most players came as well. But two players, Winniski and Mark Payne, have passed away since 1974. So have a pair of student-managers, Jon Holtmann and Steve Welsh. And as most of you know, Jennings died at the age of 88 last month, although his memory lives on as the namesake for North’s baseball field.

As expected, half-century- old memories were flowing at Saturday’s reunion and Jennings’ name came up often.

“Don was always there for us,” recalled the 68-year-old Spetter, who spent most of his adult life assistant-coaching or head-coaching North’s baseball team. “Not only was he a great coach, but he was just an excellent man. He’s going to be missed throughout the county and throughout the state. That’s for sure.”

“Jennings was the first coach who ever benched me since I got in the starting lineup [as a sophomore in 1972],” mentioned Mills, now 68 and a Greenwood resident, with a chuckle. “I had the big head because I was a sophomore starting and he sat me down. It wasn’t for the whole game, but he didn’t start me. He got my attention.”

“Coach Jennings was a very good coach, along with Herschell Allen,” emphasized Phillips, also 68, still living in Terre Haute and no longer sporting the Oscar Gamble- like afro hairstyle like he did in the early 1970s. “They were tremendous coaches. “They started the [baseball] tradition at Terre Haute North. I’m proud that I was part of that tradition.”

“He was a great coach,” echoed Mundy, 67 and residing in Terre Haute. “He was the perfect coach for our [1974] team. We had a real close team. We were close to coach Jennings and coach Allen. It was a pleasure playing for them. I wouldn’t want to have played for anybody else.”

“The first thing I think about coach Jennings was, he was such a class person,” Allen said. “He was a very nice man, a great coach and an outstanding person. … I really enjoyed being around him.”

Another popular topic Saturday was how the dream of capturing the 1974 state championship evolved.

“We wanted to go the state and win the state,” Mundy explained. “We talked about it right after the sectional in basketball. On the bus ride back from Hulman Center to North [after a loss], all we talked about was how good we’d be at baseball because we knew we were going to have a pretty good team.”

“We all got together with Don Jennings at the beginning of the season,” Spetter reflected. “ And he asked the entire team, ‘What are our goals for this year?’ Curt Phillips stood up and said, ‘There’s no other goal than winning the state championship.’ Then Don turned around and said, ‘We’re going to win the state championship.’” “We knew we were going to be good,” Allen added. “There was so much experience. We had not only the nine starters, but we had kids coming off the bench who were good also.”

Today’s youngsters might wonder what youth baseball would be like without the availability of aluminum bats.

These Terre Haute North legends would tell them that they’d survive.

“Half of us didn’t use the aluminum bats,” Spetter said of that early-1970s innovation. “They just didn’t feel right to us. So I was a wooden-bat guy.”

“I never used an aluminum bat,” Mills chimed in Saturday.

The Patriots apparently didn’t need to push the pedal to the metal to flash their offensive prowess. Except for the two previously mentioned bumps in the road, they enjoyed a highly successful regular season. One significant reason was team chemistry. Several players had been on the same Little League or Babe Ruth All-Star squads that reached national levels when they were youngsters.

“The camaraderie was what was special,” Mills insisted. “We were all great friends.”

Even on a good team, however, good players can fall into a rut. Evidently, that happened to North when it tangled with Jasper in Jasper’s own tournament.

Mundy said that was the turning point of their season because some of the non-starting seniors expressed displeasure from the dugout with what they perceived was a lack of effort from the starters. North’s starters got the hint and rallied to beat the Wildcats.

“It made the starters realize, ‘Hey, we gotta play,’” Mundy noted.

Players interviewed during the reunion agreed they probably took West Vigo lightly in their regular-season loss and they made sure history did not repeat itself in the sectional.

Leading off the regional against Brazil was an even bigger concern, it seemed. “They always played us very tough,” Spetter said.

The game most North players remembered best was their triumph over Evansville Memorial in the state semifinals. Spetter called it “a nail-biter.”

“They had us on the ropes for a bit,” Spetter acknowledged. “But we came out on top.”

A key reason that game was memorable centered around Jennings’ decision to go against his usual twogames- in-one-day pitching rotation of starting Mills first and Mundy second. You see, Mills had convinced Jennings to allow him to pitch in the championship game.

The risk there is obvious. What if North didn’t make the championship game? Evansville Memorial’s players and coaches clearly didn’t travel all the way to Lafayette to lay down for the Patriots.

Mundy, who finished 11-0 for the season, was determined to help his older teammate get there. But if you listen to Spetter, who

had the best view in the stadium from his catcher’s perspective, Mundy was battling more than just the Tigers.

“The [home-plate] umpire was not giving us anything,” he said. “I mean, he was really calling a tight strike zone.”

Despite the higher- than-usual number of walks Mundy issued, his teammates preferred Jennings leave him on the mound.

“Tim always bared down and got the strikeout or got the out to end the inning,” Spetter recalled. “It was quite stressful, though.”

When Mills was asked during the reunion about the possibility of relieving Mundy against Evansville Memorial, he replied with a grin: “Man, we haven’t changed pitchers all year. So why we gonna take Mundy out?”

Mills’ masterpiece in the nightcap boosted his season record to 9-0, but that was his farewell to baseball. He already had a basketball scholarship lined up with the University of New Orleans.

After Mills struck out Indianapolis Marshall’s final batter to clinch the victory, North’s players learned how to celebrate a state championship at the high school level.

“We all gathered between first base and the mound,” Spetter reflected. “We just piled on each other. It was chaos.”

When these fired-up teenagers finally calmed down, the IHSAA presented North with the championship trophy and each player with a medallion. Later, each player received a ring.

Even with no Internet and no texting, word of the Patriots’ accomplishment spread through Terre Haute like wildfire. So a city fire truck was summoned to Plaza North Shopping Center to provide the entire team with a ride — west on Fort Harrison Road, then south on Third Street, then east on Wabash Avenue — as citizens cheered from sidewalks at the makeshift parade.

“It was about 2 o’clock in the morning,” Spetter estimated.

“It was kind of amazing,” Mundy said of the moonlit parade, “the number of people out at that time of the morning.”

“The fan support was tremendous throughout the tournament,” Phillips added. “Terre Haute really backed us.”

When all was said and done, Mills was named first-team All-State as a pitcher and center fielder for 1974, Spetter was named second-team All-State as a catcher and Phillips was an honorable-mention All-Stater as a second baseman. Phillips also received the L.V. Phillips Mental Attitude Award at Loeb Stadium after North routed Indianapolis Marshall.

“I was surprised,” admitted Phillips, who brought the award to the reunion Saturday. “It made my parents really proud. That was a tremendous honor.” Although the Patriots achieved the goal they were discussing on the post-basketball bus ride back from Hulman Center a few months earlier in 1974, Mundy brought up a moment where it all could have come crumbling down for him and his teammates.

Andy Rice, who had tripled home three of Evansville Memorial’s four runs earlier, was batting against Mundy with a 3-2 count and the bases loaded in the sixth inning of the state semifinal contest. Mundy could tell his offering would land outside Rice’s strike zone with this umpire or possibly any umpire. But a strange thing happened.

Rice swung and missed for Strike 3. Mundy remains positive to this day that would have been Ball 4 if Rice had let it go. One more run — at least — would have scored.

“You need breaks to win a championship,” Mundy said. “And that was a break.”