MONTAGUE – The first game was the type of contest you would expect between two good teams battling for first place.

The second game definitely was not.

But the Montague Wildcats won both of them, and now are just a win away from clinching the West Michigan Conference baseball championship.

The Wildcats and North Muskegon came into Monday’s doubleheader showdown tied at the top of the conference standings with identical 10-0 records.

Montague held on and won a tight first game 1-0, then found its bats in the nightcap and walked away with a decisive 16-4 victory in five innings.

The common hero in both games was Montague’s Hayden McDonald, who knocked in the winning run in the first game and had three more RBIs in the second.

The two wins clinched at least a share of the league title for the Wildcats with two games to go. One more win will make Montague the outright champion, which is pretty good for a team that started the season 0-3 and 2-5 overall.

The Wildcats will face Shelby in a doubleheader on Tuesday.

“We play a tough schedule, and hats off to our guys for buying into playing so many tough teams in the beginning, just to see where we’re at and what we need to work on,” said Montague Coach Kevin Buchberger, whose team is now 16-9 overall and 12-0 in league play. “Then come practice time we work on those details so we can improve and win these games.”

Game 1 was a pitching duel between Montague’s Kade Johnson and North Muskegon’s Troy McManus, and both had great games.

Johnson got the complete-game win, tossing seven innings and allowing only two hits with six strikeouts and no walks.

The difference in the contest came in the fourth inning when Montague’s Colton Blankstrom singled, advanced to second on a wild pitch and came home on a double by McDonald.

“He had a heck of a game,” Coach Buchberger said about Johnson. “He was able to keep them off balance. When he throws strikes like he did today, we play well behind him and we’re a tough team to beat.  Kade kept us in the game and kept them off the board, then we did just enough to get the one run across.”

Fans who were expecting another quick, well-played game in the nightcap were surprised, because the Montague’s bats came alive with 14 hits, and North Muskegon experienced some defensive problems that allowed the Wildcats to push across 16 runs.

The Wildcats took control right away in the first inning by scoring five runs. The biggest hit came from Owen Peterson, who slashed a bases-loaded double that scored three runs. Johnson added an RBI single in the inning while Tate Stine had an RBI double.

Montague scored three more runs in the second inning on a two-run single from Colton Blankstrom and another run that scored on an error.

The Wildcats put seven more runs on the board in a long third inning. Three runs crossed the plate on bad throws by Norse fielders, McDonald added a two-run double and Peterson and Chase Gowell each had RBI groundouts.

Montague’s final run came on an RBI single by McDonald in the fourth inning.

McDonald finished with three hits in the second game, Nick Moss had four hits and scored two runs, Peterson finished with four RBIs, and Johnson had two hits and scored three runs.

Blankstrom pitched a compete-game win despite sitting for long periods of time while his team piled up the runs at the plate.

He scattered five hits over three innings while striking out three and walking none.

North Muskegon got three runs in the bottom of the third on RBI singles by Ben Meyers, Denny Belmonte and McManus, then added another run in the fifth on an RBI single by Sam Gallo.

“We had a lot of good swings and hit a lot of line drives,” Buchberger said about Game 2. “Things didn’t bounce North Muskegon’s way today. There were a couple of miscues on their part and we took advantage of it and scored a lot of runs.”