Save for Fork Union senior Austin Stone’s fourth inning grand slam, St. Anne’s-Belfield saw everything work its way. The Saints had their best offensive showing of the year and took advantage of a day where the Blue Devils weren’t themselves in the field. In the end that amounted to a 17-6 win for STAB in six innings via run rule.
“Everything clicked for us today, and in high school baseball, sometimes one team gets rolling and another gets a little down and I think that’s what happened today,” said Saints coach Alan Swanson. “It’s a young and inexperienced team we have – we don’t have any seniors. But I really like this team. The more we play, the better we get.”
St. Anne’s got off to a great jump with Jake Allen leading the game off with a double and Bobby Nicholson picking up the first of his five hits soon thereafter, an RBI single to start. Two errors on top of that allowed the Saints to finish the first up 3-0.
After tacking on two more runs in the second highlighted by a double from Nicholson, STAB officially blew the game open in the top of the third, working through 10 batters and taking a 11-0 advantage. An error and two sacrifice flies got the Saints their first three runs of the rally, and picked up three more when Nicholson cranked out a home run.
“We were just trying to get on base and base runners lead to runs, that’s really all we tried to do,” said Nicholson who was 5 for 5 with eight RBI. “We were looking for the right pitches, looking for strikes and then swinging hard at them.”
Fork Union got a shot of life in the bottom of the fourth after sitting down St. Anne’s in order in the top half of the inning. The Blue Devils all six of their runs in the fourth starting with an RBI groundout from Dale Richardson and an RBI single from Troy Coleman. That eventually led to Stone coming up to the plate with bases loaded. The senior cut the deficit to five runs with one swing, but that would be as close as FUMA could get.
“I don’t know where out play came from today because we hadn’t played like this all year,” said Blue Devils coach Rodney Carter. “We’ve played as a unit all year. We did struggle with defense early in the season, but it had been good for us for a while until today. We have been playing defense, throwing and hitting ball well. But today we could do none of the three. It’s baseball though. It happens. But as a coach, you never want to see it.”
STAB got back to adding insurance to its lead in the fifth on a single from Parker Morris followed by an RBI double from Nicholson. In the sixth, the Saints rallied again, this time for five runs including a 3-run double from Nicholson and an RBI single from Robbie Simeone. That proved to be more than enough for the Saints to work with as they were able to wrap up the win by keeping FUMA off the board in the bottom of the sixth.
The two teams won’t have to wait long to see one another. STAB (10-11) hosts Fork Union (10-8) on Friday at 6 p.m.
