Gallery by Tina Laney
Shady Spring head coach Jordan Meadows has watched his team struggle to field the baseball this season.
Tuesday night it was the exact opposite for the Tigers in a regional showdown with PikeView.
While the home team was taking care of its business in the field, the Panthers were not so fortunate.
Committing six errors in the contest, PikeView cracked the door open and Shady Spring took full advantage for a 5-1 win.
“That has been us all season long and it does feel good to be on the other side for a change. I told the guys when we started figuring stuff out and made the routine plays, we were going to be a good team,” Meadows said. “We have been to the regional championship and states the last couple years. Yeah, these guys are young and need a lot of work, but they found a way to win the game. PikeView is a great team, but you saw the competitiveness. These kids saw the rankings and they got all aggravated because they weren’t in it anymore. They love being out here.”
In a rematch of last year’s Class AA Region 3 championship combatants, Meadows handed the ball to sophomore hurler Sam Barnett.
“I told him all along that he is our ace this year,” Meadows said. “He throws a gem and pitches to contact, especially when we have a lead. Sam wanted the ball and he had a great game.”
Barnett set the tone early by retiring the first six Panthers (12-5) in order and his teammates did their part by picking him up at the dish with a quick lead.
A pair of walks and a wild pitch set the stage for Aiden Calvert who lifted a sacrifice fly to right, giving Shady (6-7) a 1-0 lead.
The Tigers doubled the lead in the second frame aided by a one-out walk to Aiden Brown and some poor defense by the Panthers.
The trouble for PikeView started on a hard ground ball from Brody Seabolt which could not be handled at short. When the ball also evaded the center-fielder for the second error on the play, Brown rolled into third.
The Shady Spring left-fielder then scored on a ground ball from Gavin Davis making it a 2-0 game.
“We didn’t make six errors all last week at Myrtle Beach combined. It was a rough one,” PikeView head coach Josh Wyatt lamented. “It is disciplined baseball and we didn’t show ours tonight. What has carried us through to this point is good pitching and defense. We roll with that. We just didn’t show that tonight.”
The visitors cut the lead in half in the third on an RBI-single from freshman Landon Wyatt.
Unfortunately for the Panthers, they managed just one hit over the next four innings.
“We found excuses at the plate too and we were just outside of our norm. I think maybe we were too hungry for an opportunity,” Wyatt said. “We didn’t take advantage and found some excuses. Losers are always the ones that make excuses. We found those tonight.”
Shady Spring tacked on two additional runs in the fourth inning thanks to three more PikeView errors in the stanza.
While Barnett was keeping PikeView silent, his opposite, freshman Eli Hilling was pitching a strong game in his own right.
Already with a school record 20-strikeout game to his credit this year, Hilling allowed just one hit all night and fanned 11 Tigers in the loss.
“We found ourselves being a little complacent. Eli has been dominant through a couple of outings,” Wyatt said. “He was pretty dominant tonight through six innings. It was just weak ground balls that we weren’t aggressive on. It was like we were trying to rush things.”
The only hit for Shady came in the sixth inning on a double from Seabolt, setting the stage for the final run of the night via a hit batsman with the bases loaded.
Barnett ended the night with eight strikeouts, but gave credit to his defense in the big win for the Tigers.
“My teammates made the plays when they hit the ball off me. The outfield made the catches and the infield made no errors,” Barnett said. “That is what wins games. Even though we only had one hit, we put the ball in play and they made the errors. That is all that matters.”
Wyatt also talked about Barnett keeping his batters off balance most of the night.
“I felt like we were trying to pull an outside pitch tonight. Kudos to Barnett, he did a great job of identifying the outside plate and living there,” Wyatt said. “When you see that frustration in another team, we teach our pitchers to feed on that. I think Jordan and his staff did a phenomenal job of doing that as well.”
The two titans will meet once more in the regular season. That game will be played April 30, in Gardner.