BF goes 10 innings to top Post 13
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Bennington Post 13’s Tanner Williams slides safely into third base as Bellows Falls Post 37’s Zach Whitcomb applies the tag during Monday’s action at the American Legion State Baseball Tournament in Barre Town. Action continues today at the tournament. STEFAN HARD / TIMES ARGUS |
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By Chuck Clarino STAFF WRITER - Published: July 28, 2009
BARRE TOWN – The Bellows Falls Post 37 baseball team must have felt they were in a time warp; Post 37 found itself in an extra-inning game that it lost in the 10th inning Sunday night and Monday evening was right back in the 10th inning.
But Bellows Falls won Monday's game in true walk-off fashion when David Lockerby drew a walk with the bases loaded lifting Post 37 to a 6-5 victory over Bennington Post 13 at Michael E. Gibson Field in the Vermont State American Legion Baseball Tournament.
BF will play at least one more game against the winner of the OEC Kings and Colchester Cannons that immediately followed.
Here's where it gets tricky.
If Colchester wins, OEC is eliminated and Colchester will meet BF Tuesday at 4 p.m. If OEC wins there will be three teams with one loss but since Colchester technically won the winners' bracket game Sunday night the Cannons would get a bye and meet the winner of the BF-OEC game Tuesday evening.
Bellows Falls and Bennington were locked up at 5-5 since the seventh inning. And neither team had mounted much of a threat until the bottom of the 10th when BF loaded the bases on two bases on balls and a hit batter. Up came David Lockerby, the team's No. 9 hitter and possibly the least likely player to take a walk.
Bennington started the inning with left-hander Zak LeBarron on the mound. But after issuing a walk to Tyler Russell to lead the inning and recording an out on a sacrifice bunt, LeBarron had to exit because he had pitched the quota of innings allowed under American Legion tournament rules. Bennington coach Walt Parmenter gave the nod to his nephew, 16-year-old Kyle Parmenter, a right-hander who has pitched well in this tournanament.
But clearly Parmenter grappled with his control. He did get an infield out but hit Reilly Clark and walked Justin Spaulding to bring Lockerby to the dish.
"It was great but it's funny because he's usually really aggressive," said Spaulding, who pitched all 10 innings and recorded his second win of the tournament. "He's probably the most aggressive hitter on the team … but he was patient."
Patient he was, working the count to 3-1 and then the next pitch sailed high. Lockerby jumped up but his father and coach Bob Lockerby told him to run and tag first. When Russell came home with the winning run, the Bellows Falls players seemed dazed and had to be prompted into a celebration.
Spaulding, who went the distance and recorded the win, looks more like a basketball player than a baseball pitcher. Over 6-foot-5, he is a control pitcher who will never overpower a batter but relies on changing speeds and utilizes a two-seam and a four-seam fastball.
The tall, lean right-hander held Bennington to seven hits with three walks and six strikeouts and was in command pretty much the whole way.
"I just got 145 pitches and 10 innings out of Justin (Spaulding) but he didn't want me to give this ball to anybody else," said Bob Lockerby. "That one inning (when Bennington scored four runs) made me nervous but he really had them off balance."
BF scored an unearned run off Bennington starter Corey Armstrong in the first. Then they made it 2-0 when Zach Whitcomb drove in Justin Beebe with a single to left center in the fifth.
Bennington got nothing going until the sixth when Post 13 erupted for four runs on four hits. The big blow was a two-run single by Dan Krebs. Kyle Parmenter added a sac-fly and another run was forced home when Spaulding hit Tanner Williams with the bases loaded.
"I was gassed after about four or five innings," said Spaulding. "I got tired and started to die and they scored those runs. I adjusted after that. When I'm tired the ball comes up and I have to calm myself down and adjust my mechanics."
One big key was that immediately after Bennington scored the four runs to snatch a 4-2 lead, Bellows Falls responded with three runs to take the 5-4 lead. Brian Bashaw's lead double, an RBI single by Spaulding and Lockerby's two-run single were the telling blows.
Still ironing out his mechanics in the seventh, Bennington touched Spaulding for one more run in the seventh. Dan Pierce's one-out single, a double by Armstrong and an error were the scoring components.
After that, it was Spaulding dueling with first Armstrong, then LeBarron and finally Kyle Parmenter as the afternoon turned to evening.
"That was a hard loss game; we just couldn't score," said Bennington coach Walt Parmenter. "We had our chances that's why I had Zak out there. If we scored a run they wouldn't touch him. He pitched his heart out for me.
"But poor Kyle. He just wanted to make sure he threw a strike and he couldn't. "
Pierce, Armstrong and LeBarron collected two hits apiece for Bennington, while Whitcomb was the lone player on BF with more than one hit.
OEC Kings 9, Colchester 8
The OEC Kings scored seven unearned runs in the bottom of the ninth inning to steal a 9-8 victory over the Colchester Cannons in an improbable game to stave off elimination and live one more day in the American Legion State Baseball Tournament.
The Kings manufactured the runs with the help of four Colchester errors including a dropped ball by the first baseman on what appeared to be the final out with the game tied at 8-8.
The Colchester team rushed onto the field because they thought it was a bad call. But the umpires huddled and the run was awarded to OEC which went wild.
Buddy LaMothe earned the win with four innings of three-hit, four-strikeout relief.
Kris Couchan was the hard-luck loser in relief and the victim of a horrible defensive collapse.
But the shame of it was that Colchester starting pitcher Matt Ravey went 8.1 innings and probably should have earned the win, giving up seven hits, four walks and two strikeouts.
Jordan Portre and LaMothe had two hits each for OEC. Couchan, Brandon Cross and Justin Bara had two hits apiece for the Cannons.
Today's action begin with Bellows Falls and OEC meeting at 4 p.m. with the winner facing the Cannons with the state title and a trip to the Northeast Regional in Manchester, N.H., on the line.
chuck.clarino@rutlandherald.com
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