NEWS

By Marc Goldstein

Baseball is a funny sport. Sometimes, losses can be all a team needs to springboard to success. This might be the case with the Metro South County Braves. The Braves parlayed some of the offensive potency seen in their previous game into Sunday’s 13-0 blowout win over the Southern Maryland Senators.

The Braves were excellent at the plate, but not all the credit should be given to their bats. The Senators gave away 11 free passes, more than the ten hits they surrendered on the evening.

The offensive barrage began early for the Braves as after a quick 1-2-3 top of the first inning, they went straight to work. JT Landwehr (Mt. St. Mary’s) led off the game with a single, but was quickly erased on a caught stealing. Landwehr was thrown out on the basepaths twice in the game, one of few miscues for the Braves all night. The next two batters both walked before Katcher Halligan (Houston Baptist) launched a three-run homer to put the Braves up 3-0. The Senators would limit the damage to three runs and keep the Braves off the scoreboard in the second, but the rest of the game would be more of the same.

The bottom of the third inning got off to a poor start for the Senators as Landwehr drew a leadoff walk, then advanced on a passed ball. Landwehr would continue to terrorize on the basepaths by stealing third and scoring on an errant throw. Braden Ramirez (Dayton) would restart the rally with a single. After Halligan drew a walk, the Senators brought in a fresh arm to relieve. Unfortunately, the first batter to face the new pitcher, Quinn Madden (James Madison), roped an RBI single that would plate Ramirez.

The scoring would cease for the inning, but the Braves would pick up right where they left off in the fourth. Ramirez knocked in Landwehr with an RBI single and two more runs would score off an error, one of five committed by the Senators. A subsequent bases-loaded walk would bring in yet another run, making the score 9-0 in favor of the Braves.

Three more would score in the bottom of the fifth due to a sacrifice fly and a two-run error by the Senators. Finally, the scoring would be finished when Halligan would hit another Brave, this time with a single in the sixth inning. The game was closed out after seven innings due to the Ripken Sr. League’s run rule.

However, for as good as the Braves offense was, the pitching and defense were arguably better. A Braves team that went into the game giving up an average of 12.25 runs per game, put together an unexpected shutout while playing error-free baseball.

Aaron Park (New Jersey Institute of Technology) was superb on the mound. Pitching with a large lead, Park was able to shut down the opposition to allow his offense to go to work, surrendering just one hit and two walks in his time on the bump. In relief, Parker Hogge (Slippery Rock) would twirl three innings of three-hit ball while striking out three. Both Park and Hogge struggled in their season debuts, but turned things around in this one to keep the shutout intact.

This triumph by the Braves sees them move into second place in a very crowded South Division that has three teams within a game of one another behind the Aces. While the Aces appear to be the cream of the crop of this division, the fact remains that there is a power vacuum left behind it, one that the Braves will look to capitalize on and use the previous two games as a starting point.