Staff photo by Steve Muscatello New Ulm Legion Gold’s Aaron Portner delivers a pitch in a recent game. Portner has been one of New Ulm’s top pitchers so far this year.

NEW ULM — When the summer baseball season began for New Ulm Legion Gold, head coach Chris Peters said that he knew he had a good team coming into the season.

He just did not know how good.

“We had some good talent coming in with players from all three high schools,” he said. “But I did not expect to be 31-4 like we are but the kids played hard, showed what they have and the talent that they have.”

That talent has led New Ulm to its first Sub-State 2 title since 2015 and a trip to the Minnesota State American Legion Baseball Tournament. New Ulm opens the tournament at 12:30 p.m. Thursday in Cold Spring against Cold Spring, the host team.

Peters said that despite the impressive 31-4 record, Gold did start out slow due to some players missing games because of school trips and vacations at the start of the season.

“When they came back, we bonded as a team and players found their roles on the team,” Peters said. “We went on a 19-game winning streak at one point in the season.”

That streak included winning the Upper Midwest Classic and going deep into the Gopher Classic, where they lost in the championship to Wayzata.

Peters said that winning the Upper Midwest Classic was huge.

“We played a lot of games in a short period of time,” he said. “We beat some tough teams — when you beat teams like Creighton Prep and Chaska and Eastview, that is huge.”

Peters also stressed that the 19-game winning streak and the Sub-State title was a combined effort of all 16 players on the team.

“I have 16 players and three of them are also playing with the Junior Legion,” he said. “And I tell the kids after every game that this is a total team effort — there is nothing that I can do different. I have confidence in all 16 players. Everyone got to start in the Gopher Classic and again I believe in all of them.”

This season, New Ulm Gold comes into the state tournament hitting .356 as a team and are led by Super-Senior Hunter Ranweiler, who comes in with an amazing .531 batting average. He also leads the team with 14 stolen bases. Aaron Portner has a .440 average with Chris Knowles at .435 and Mason Cox at .406.

If opposing pitchers want to pitch around them, they will have to pick their poison with Colton Schaefer (.394), Jaden Domeier (.385), Josh Seidl (.330) or Teddy Giefer (.340).

The mound staff is just as dominant led by Mark Schommer at 6-0 with a 1.45 ERA. Portner and Braden Zimmerman are each 5-1 with ERAs of 2.48 and 2.26, respectively. Jace Marotz and Giefer are each 4-0 with a 2.05 ERA and 1.65 ERA.

Cole Backer comes in at 3-1 and a 1.06 ERA.

Peters thinks that the team’s strength is a combination of both offense, defense and pitching.

“We have five guys who I can send out to the mound with confidence to win games and then we have out hitting one through nine. They are all tough outs.”

Peters said that Domeier is a good lead-off hitter.

“When he gets on base, good things happen,” Peters said. “He gets on base.”

Peters thinks that the key to Gold making a deep run in the state tournament is hitting.

“We are going to have to hit,” he said. “Our bats went a little quiet against Mankato [American] so we are going to have to make adjustments and put the ball in play. I think that we can go deep in the state tournament. We have five strong starting pitchers but I also have four pitchers who can do some relief work. We are going to be hard to beat.”