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No barn burner
JHS takes down Pittsfield, 15-10
For a 15-10 game, this one really dragged.
Neither Jacksonville, the winner, nor Pittsfield left the Jacksonville High School ball yard feeling proud of the display they put on Monday afternoon. But at least Crimsons’ senior Quinton Miller got out feeling good. After lining out into double plays on his first two swings of the bat, Miller saw his next three swings drive in five runs: a two-run single in the third, a two-run homer in the fourth and then a sacrifice fly in the sixth that brought home Jacksonville’s 15th run of the long, long contest.
“He had quality at-bats all day today,” said JHS skipper P.J. Moore. “If somebody hits a line drive out at somebody, we count that as a quality at-bat on our team. Eventually, the law of averages will catch up, and that surely showed up today.”
Miller said the double plays hurt, but he didn’t let them derail his focus at the plate.
“I was just trying to put that in back of my mind and focus on the pitches I still had coming,” said Miller.
That’s something Monday’s slobbering St. Bernard of a game had a lot of. Pitches. The Crimsons (14-11) at least got to add another “W” to their book, but only after failing twice to put their opponent away by the 10-run mercy rule.
The Saukees (16-7) went away even more shaken. With a week to go before Class 1A and 2A regionals, they saw their normally untouchable ace Henry Johnson (8-0) knocked around, and still consider themselves in a hitting slump, despite scoring 10 runs.
It was that kind of game.
“At this point of the year, things ought to be smoother for both teams,” said Pittsfield skipper John Schultz. “We should be playing better ball. Four innings and two hours in, between both teams, we set baseball back a hundred years.”
Whoa. Guys like Honus Wagner, Frank Chance and especially Ty Cobb might take exception to a statement like that, were they still alive. Even deadball-era cranks would have trouble sitting through the two-and-a-half hour quagmire that JHS and Pittsfield found themselves in. Every at-bat seemed to run to a full count. The bases were constantly loaded, yet most of the day’s runs crossed the plate in dribs and drabs: a couple of passed balls here, a wild pitch there. A bad throw. A sac fly. Couple of RBI groundouts. Several bases-loaded walks. Get the idea?
“We just didn’t come out and make the defensive plays that we should have made,” said JHS skipper P.J. Moore, whose Crimsons committed three fielding errors, and two passed balls while pitchers walked six batters and hit two more. “One miscue leads to another and then to another, and it gets out of hand sometimes.”
After an eight-run third inning, Jacksonville had leads of 11-2 and 13-4 before the fifth inning, but couldn’t stamp out Pittsfield’s last flickering ember. By the sixth inning, it had grown back into a blaze, after third baseman Zach Ferguson smashed a three-run homer over the center field fence, pulling his team to within 13-10.
It was literally Pittsfield’s only clutch hit of the afternoon. The Saukees did go 3-for-12 with runners in scoring position Monday, but two of those hits were singles that didn’t drive runners in.
“In the last two games, we’ve kind of let things slip away when we’ve gotten big leads,” said Moore, whose Crimsons nearly blew an 8-2 early lead at Pleasant Plains Saturday morning, before escaping with an 8-7 victory.
Freshman Caleb Howell started the game and got the win, thanks mostly to gobs of run support, and the Saukees’ struggles to deliver hits in the clutch. Howell struck out six, walked four and hit two batters over his four innings of work, while allowing three hits and unspooling two wild pitches. In relief, Brian Davenport somehow gave up five runs (all of them unearned) on just one hit. Because of that, Pittsfield’s Johnson wriggled out of getting tagged with his first loss of the season.
But Johnson still gave up seven runs (four earned) on seven hits, while walking four and striking out none in less than three innings. Schultz had hoped for better.
“I know that JHS has been hot, and they’re coming off two big wins,” Schultz said. “This was a big game for us, one that we would have liked to have at least stayed competitive in, but it sure didn’t start out that way.”
The teams were competitive for a while. JHS led only 3-2 when it came to bat in the bottom of the third, and eventually loaded the bases with two outs against Johnson. The Crimsons’ Adam Bruner drew a walk to force in one run, causing Schultz to replace his ace with Jordan Cawthon.
After another JHS run crossed the plate on a passed ball (making it 5-2), Crimsons senior J.T. Rowe bounced a chopper to Ferguson at third base. Ferguson got the ball, but his throw to first went wild, and two more runners scored.
Seven more hitters came to the plate for Jacksonville that inning, and four more crossed it, turning Monday’s tilt into an early rout — but not an early finish.
“That was not one of our best games,” said Jacksonville’s Miller. “It’s a good thing we were able to come out, even without our best game, and just slug ’em to death, I guess.”
The Crimsons scored 15 runs on 16 hits, while drawing six walks of their own. Jacksonville went 9-for-14 with runners in scoring position, but only Miller drove in more than one run.
“We swung the bats well, no question about that,” said Moore. “And we ran the bases well. We just didn’t play well defensively. Defense wins games and pitching wins championships. We slipped a little bit in those departments.”
Jacksonville is at Lincoln today to resume Central State Eight play. Miller will take the hill against the Railsplitters and try to improve the Crimsons’ league mark to 8-3.
“We definitely want to have a better showing against Lincoln than we had today,” Miller said. “Hopefully, the hitting stays the same, but the pitching and defense have got to be better.”
