AUBURN — One of the standard questions when a baseball team is scouting its opponent in a state championship game is, “Yeah, but have they used up their ace?”

Technically, Saint Dominic Academy did. Mike Bryant went the distance Wednesday night in a 5-1 victory over Winthrop for the Class C West title, meaning that he won’t be available when the Saints square off Saturday with Bucksport at Bangor’s Mansfield Stadium.

Don’t shed too many tears for St. Dom’s. The Saints are well-armed for a school their size. Coach Bob Blackman has two additional aces up his sleeve.

If Bryant was St. Dom’s 1-A, then 1-B is Mitch Lorenz, a left-hander who has earned a decision in 12 of the Saints’ 20 contests and already owns two playoff wins. And 1-C is Gavin Bates, a freshman who is built like a grown man and already has been clocked at 86 mph on a radar gun.

Lorenz will draw the 3 p.m. start Saturday. Bates will be his battery mate, waiting in the wings if the Saints need a late-inning pickup.

“I love having him back there,” Lorenz said. “We’re become pretty good friends, especially becoming line mates for hockey, too. We definitely know each other pretty well. It’s nice. We can trust each other.”

Blackman leaned on Lorenz throughout the rocky first segment of the Saints’ season, when they stumbled out of the gate 3-4 after Bryant suffered a hamstring injury.

He threw as often as the rules mandating time off for pitchers would allow, starting back-to-back games if the Saints had the luxury of pulling him after three innings, or rebounding on the minimum three days’ rest whenever he had to work a complete game.

“I think it might have been more of a mental thing, kind of stressful having to come back so much,” Lorenz said. “Overall my arm held up fine.”

Lorenz, 7-5 with an ERA around 1.00, doesn’t quite know what to do with all the time on his hands these days. He tossed a two-hit shutout in a 3-0 semifinal triumph at Maranacook.

“He’ll have a full week, so there’s no excuse there,” Blackman said.

“I don’t remember the last time I had that,” Lorenz said. “That’ll be nice. I think my arm should be fully recovered and ready to go.”

Lorenz effectively sealed the Maranacook game in the fifth inning. Up two runs, he loaded the bases with a hit batsman and two walks before getting the next three outs, the last against John Winkin Award finalist Cam Brochu.

“I went out to the mound and said, ‘This is your doing. I can’t help you here, my friend.’ We had to go right after him, try to keep it in on his hands,” Blackman said. “He hit a two-hopper right down to (third baseman Justin) Keaney.”

After starting the Class C West final as a junior against Sacopee Valley, then winning a game for Bessey Motors in the American Legion state tournament last summer, Lorenz was a known quantity.

Bates, on the flip side, was a 15-year-old who didn’t even have a chance to catch his coach’s eye the first week of practice. He was in Texas at a hockey showcase.

“(Blackman) had to take a risk,” Bates said. “I appreciate him for trusting me, because I wasn’t there for tryouts. It took some guts.”

This is the second consecutive year that the Saints put a freshman behind the plate.

Keaney, the incumbent, looked solid in Bates’ early absence, leading Blackman to think he would take advantage of the newcomer’s athleticism elsewhere.

“The deciding factor was at practice one day, we were testing his pop time to second and we were like, ‘We’ve got a gun here.’ How do you not use it?” Blackman said.

Keaney moved to the hot corner, which also paid off for the Saints. His catch of a line drive stymied a seventh-inning rally by Winthrop in the regional final.

How do two proven seniors feel about trusting a rookie backstop?

“He’s a 6-foot-2 freshman. He could beat the crap out of me, so I don’t need to say too much to him,” Lorenz quipped.

In addition to his duties behind the dish, Bates is 3-0 with an ERA under one in six pitching appearances, highlighted by 38 strikeouts in 22 innings. He was thrown into the fire in his first start at Dirigo, a nerve-wracking assignment in which he issued a dozen walks.

Bates and Blackman went back to work on his mechanics. The youngster’s other two starts: a three-hit shutout with 13 strikeouts against then-No. 1 Monmouth, backed up by a no-hitter and 14 whiffs against Telstar.

“After the Monmouth game he said, ‘Coach, can you put me on the gun?’ We had no idea. We knew he was probably close to 80 or in the 80s,” Blackman said. “Eighty-six. I said to Justin Keaney, ‘Remember this. What does this say? So they don’t think I’m lying.’ Next pitch, boom, 86 again. I said, OK, let’s work on a curveball.”

“I knew I threw hard, but I’d never been clocked. It surprised me,” Bates said. “I was more pumped than anything. With my size, it didn’t really surprise me.”

Lorenz also threw a two-hitter against Madison in a 3-1 preliminary-round victory. St. Dom’s allowed a total of eight hits in its four Western playoff wins.

St. Dom’s won the most recent of its four state titles under Blackman in 2011. Lorenz doesn’t need to be reminded that his teams were denied in the Class A hockey final three of his four years.

“It’s definitely weird thinking about it’s my last high school game for anything, ever,” Lorenz said. “I think it drives us to want to win even more.”

Bates isn’t old enough to remember a time when the Saints’ diamond expectations were anything less than hoisting the Golden Glove, yet he, too, seems to share Lorenz’s sense of urgency.

“We’re losing seven seniors, so next year we might struggle, and we don’t know when we’re going to make it back to a state game,” Bates said. “It’s not something that happens all the time. It’s the seniors’ last chance, but you can’t take it for granted. It could be our last chance.”

Sounds like an ace in the making.

koakes@sunjournal.com