Tigers, Lady Cougars among first-day winners
Roane State had the bases loaded and no outs in the first inning and got nothing.
Chattanooga State then scored four runs in the bottom of the inning with the help of two Raiders errors, and the Tigers rolled to a seven-inning 18-4 victory in their play-in game Sunday in the 2018 TCCAA/NJCAA Region VII baseball tournament at Chatt State.
On the adjacent softball field, Cleveland State’s fifth-seeded Lady Cougars defeated fourth seed Motlow State 5-2 in the first non-playin game of the day, after Roane State edged Jackson State 13-12 in eight innings and Columbia State scored two runs in the seventh to clip Southwest Tennessee 3-2. Third seed Volunteer State beat Dyersburg State 3-0 in the last softball game of the first day.
Jackson State topped Southwest in the first baseball play-in and will face nationally No. 1 Walters State (50-6) at 1 p.m. today, after Cleveland State takes on Dyersburg State at 10 a.m. Third seed Columbia State meets Vol State in the 4:30 game, and Chattanooga State faces No. 2 seed Motlow at 7:30.
The seventh-seeded Tigers (3319) may well have won anyway Sunday. They had three extra-base hits in that first inning — an RBI triple by Hayden Lock and doubles by Theron Powell and Noah Fitzgerald — and totaled 15 hits against 10th-seeded Roane (1033), which wound up 2-25 against TCCAA opponents this season.
But the first inning clearly was a tone-setter.
“Getting on them early, that’s what everybody wants to do,” winning pitcher Jordan Power said later, adding in his Australian accent, “As a pitcher it’s lovely to have such an early lead.”
Of his own success to get out of the top of the first, he said he was focused on damage control against No. 5 batter Jake Blevins with the bags packed. Figuring Blevins wanted to hit one in the air to the outfield, Power got him to pop out foul on a 3-1 pitch, and then Chris Santos flied out to center field.
Roane did score its first run in four games this season against the Tigers in the second inning, but Chattanooga State got three in the third when Ty Delancey and Chris Tyler opened with singles and Powell and Fitzgerald doubled again. With the score already 10-1, the Tigers added eight in the sixth.
Powell was 3-for-4 with a walk, a hit by pitch and four RBIs, and Fitzgerald was 3-for-5 with three doubles. Delancey was 2-for-3 with two walks and three runs scored.
Shiane Stockwell pitched a five-hitter with only one earned run allowed in Cleveland State’s softball win, and she had the game’s first RBI when hit by a pitch in the second inning. Emily Yell then scored on a passed ball, and Macy Bryant and Courtney Mooneyham homered in the next inning. Grayson Brown doubled in a run in the fourth.
Yell was 2-for-4 with the run scored, as was Kylie Thackerson for Motlow.
Winning a region bracket game was “a huge milestone” for the Lady Cougars, coach Katie Willingham said.
“We fought,” she added. “Something we worked on all week was focus — and that was on defense as well as offense. If we keep this momentum up, we can be very successful this week.”
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@ timesfreepress.com or 423-7576291.