During the regular season, Spotsylvania Post 320 accounted for one of Albemarle Post 74’s two District 12 losses. On Tuesday the two squads met up for the fifth time this year with Albemarle needing just one victory to earn the tournament championship and bid to the state tournament and Spotsylvania in need of a win to force another game to be played Wednesday in the double elimination format.
There will be no American Legion baseball in Central Virgnia on Wednesday.
From the moment Albemarle stepped into the batters box, the ball was flying around Porterfield Park. And with eight different hitters providing at least one RBI, Post 74 cruised to a 16-3 win via slaughter rule in seven innings.
“Honestly, with what we lost last year and how young this group is, I didn’t think that this was possible at the beggining of the year,” said Albemarle coach Mike Maynard. “This is a special group led by two great leaders, Vince Coles and Rashad Talley.”
The two Albemarle graduates had their way both on defense where they tracked down hard hit fly ball, and offense where they ignited Albemarle’s run-scoring binge. Coles went 3 for 4 with two RBI, three runs scored and three stolen bases. Talley robbed Spotsylvania of what looked to be two extra base hits while going 1 for 3 with an RBI and a run scored.
“We played really good defense tonight,” Talley said. “That’s probably as good as we’ve been all year. We caught just about everything and did our best to try and help out our pitcher.”
Coles broke open the scoring in the top of the first, bringing home Eli Haden on an RBI single before reaching home himself on a sacrifice fly from Logan Forloines.
After Post 320 plated a runner in the top of the second on a fielder’s choice RBI from Chris Armstrong, Albemarle answered by tagging seven more runs on the board to make it a 9-2 ball game.
“We wanted to get this done with one game,” said Coles. “We came out to compete and we tried to set up it early and take the lead so we would be comfortable in any situation later in the game.”
Talley brought home the first run of the rally with a fielders choice RBI. Then after Haden was walked, Coles, Danny Morris, Forloines, Joey Varaksa and Josh Sites picked up successive basehits and RBI’s with Forloines triple to centerfield highlighting the way.
Albemarle increased its lead to 10 in the bottom of the fifth with a 2-run spurt with two outs on a double from Talley, an RBI single from Haden, a walk to Coles and 2-run double from Morris.
Spotsylvania put it’s third run on the board with another fielders choice RBI, this time from Nick Lacik in the top of the sixth inning. In fact Post 320 appeared to have something brewing just before Lacik’s RBI with a pair of runners on base and no outs. But after a David Hester single to right field, Coles got the ball to Forloines behind the plate who subsequently tagged out Chris Ardiente trying to score from second. With two runners on base, Albemarle pitcher Jason White picked up a key second out on a strike out, and two batters later a pop fly to second base ended the threat.
The bottom of the sixth was the kiss of death for Spotsylvania as Albemarle spotted six more runs to it’s lead to go up by 13. With Varaksa on the mound in relief in the top of the seventh, Post 74 wrapped up the win and a trip to play in the state tournament.
Albemarle will get a week off before they have to play again. The team will arrive in Danville on Monday before playing its first game at American Legion Park against an opponent yet to be named.
“I gave the kids the next few days off,” Maynard said. “The nice thing is that we’ll be going into the tournament healthy and all our pitchers will be on full rest. We’ve finished second in this tournament before, hopefully we can represent baseball in Charlottesville and come home with a better finish.”
