1976 Baseball State Championship
INTERVIEW WITH PITCHER JIM MEHLING
The 1976 baseball team made it the final four. The go to pitchers were Jim Mehling, and Jim Kippenbrock.They used wooden bats with Ken Lamkin-shortstop,Gregg Uebelhor “Itch”-First baseman,Joe weyer- Right fielder,Scott Uebelhor-Catcher,Rock Emmert-Second baseman,3rd-Baseman Tom Olinger. Went with a 21-9 record including winning the jasper sectional vs dubois in the championship 3-2 in extra innings, with Mehiling signaling the winning run in the 8th inning, after that they went on to beat the regional championship agianst loogootee with a score of 9-2 in the championship game,then after the regionals they headed to the semi-state beating Bloomington South 2-0 in the championship game,but after all the wins they lost to Sullivan in the state finals by a score of 3-0, with loosing the state final.
They kept a decent average between them all with Jim Mehling having a .436% Battting Average and Paul Rhue having a .322% BA, While having two leaders in RBI's which were Jim Mehling with 24 RBI's and Bill Niehaus with 25 RBI's and only one leader with stolen bases which was Tom Olinger with 13 Stolen Bases. On another note Jim Mehling's view of Coach Peacock was that he was a "no nonsense guy" and he was the type of guy that you were going to do what he told you and there is no arguing with it, "First Week of may we were about 500 and we played tecumseh, which was a smaller school then us" acoording to Mehling at that time they lost and the Coach famously said " see you out on the flagpole" according to Mehling. On a different note Jim Mehling Went on to play college ball playing at Indiana State but with Paul Rhue he went off to Bellarmine
In 1976, Forest Park’s baseball team was a .500 squad near the end of the regular season. But the Rangers discovered their stride in the postseason, notching a pair of walk-off victories and impressive semistate shutouts of Evansville Mater Dei and Bloomington South. Their run to the Final Four was the first state finals appearance by a Forest Park team.
Somehow, some way, it all worked.
It worked in the sectional, when Forest Park was three outs away from being erased by Northeast Dubois in the championship. It worked in the regional semifinals, when Washington bombed a game-tying homer in the seventh inning before the Rangers’ high-wire act continued with a walk-off win. It worked in the semistate, against an Evansville Mater Dei team that Forest Park had lost to earlier in the season, and against a Bloomington South squad the Rangers feared they’d be blown out by.
Thirty-eight years later, it still works.
Leadoff hitter Ken Lamkin(President of Mobel Inc.), catcher Scott Uebelhor(Co-Owns Uebelhor TV) and Jim Mehling are all gathered at Forest Park High School in the office of Mehling, the ace pitcher who’s now the school’s principal. When someone asks aloud how the Rangers beat Washington, the team’s trivia extraordinaire produces an instant answer. “Ruhe hit a little flare to left field,” Uebelhor, practically without having to think, says of Paul Ruhe’s(CEO of Mobel Inc.) winning RBI single. Mehling, with his warm, perpetual smile, tosses out all sorts of analytics, going down the roster of that year’s Ranger baseball team and recalling who offered this and who supplied that in helping Forest Park bust through on a big stage for the first time athletically. Lamkin, in his deep, rich voice, recalls tale after tale of Jim Peacock(Operates Indinapolis American Family Insurance Branch) , his former coach with a no-nonsense edge but a universally beloved aura.
And when those guys need help filling in the blanks about their odyssey to the 1976 state baseball finals, Mehling picks up the phone and starts dialing.
Coach Peacock; Jim Mehling, he says, pausing for the greeting from his former coach.
I couldn’t be any better. How are you doing? Do you have a few minutes to contribute?
The blueprint was much the same in the summer of ’76, when a laid-back bunch of 15 Rangers merged their unique skill sets for something their community had been pining for. Forest Park announced itself as a statewide basketball power in the 2000s and the Ranger football program didn’t enter the picture until a few years after. Way before all that, though, the Ranger baseball team of ’76 took the Southeast Dubois community by storm, becoming the school’s first big thing.
“We were only four years after consolidation in ’76. So we were kind of looking for something,” Uebelhor says.“In a school that was proud of their athletics but had never won anything, that was the first really big one,” Mehling adds.
Before they won, frustration had been the familiar refrain.
The prior two basketball seasons had ended with the Rangers positioning themselves for a sectional title run but no trophy in hand. The consensus is that the ’75 Ranger baseball team was better, but that season ended with a 7-6 setback to Bedford North Lawrence in the regional final.
Then came that Tecumseh game in the late spring of ’76 — a mess so colossal, that Uebelhor, Lamkin and Mehling merely laugh about it now. Flummoxed by a soft-throwing lefty, the Rangers trudged home from Tecumseh with a loss that dropped their record to .500. It caused Peacock to famously sniff at his team, “You guys are so bad you don’t even know how to wear your baseball hats.”