Cavs battle back in four-run fifth
Hodges’ bat, glove help save victory for starter Blohm
The Archbishop Spalding baseball team had a character-building inning at Calvert Hall that it might look back on fondly later this season.
After surrendering their lead in the fourth, the No. 2 Cavaliers answered with four runs in the top of the fifth and battled out of a jam in the bottom of the frame.
Pitcher Tyler Blohm and right fielder LaVale Hodges were the biggest heroes as the defending Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association A Conference champions left No. 1 Calvert Hall with a 5-2 win on Monday.
Blohm pitched six innings to get the win, allowing two runs on four hits with eight strikeouts. Hodges smacked a two-run triple to deep center field to give the Cavaliers the lead, then made a diving catch to end the Cardinals’ threat in the bottom of the key fifth inning. Zach Thornton pitched the seventh to get the save, ending the game when he struck out Jack Finn.
Spalding (13-3, 6-3) avenged a 3-0 loss to first-place Calvert Hall (13-6, 8-2) on March 25.
“We couldn’t lose another game to them. It’s a big rivalry in this conference,” Hodges said. “We needed a big hit, and I had to come through with one. We had two people on base, and that’s what really got us going. It was a first-pitch curveball. He threw that my last at-bat, and I took it for some reason. But I figured it was coming again, and it was right there. Our energy is outstanding right now. We’ve been having big games lately, and this was a really big one.”
After J.P. Murphy led off the bottom of the fourth with a double for the Cardinals, Mike Finn lined a home run over the left-field fence to give the hosts a 2-1 lead.
The Cavaliers made sure it wouldn’t last, though. Ezio Rebechi and Kevin Heiss drew walks to open the fifth off Cardinals starter Bradley Weber. After David Har- ding’s sacrifice bunt moved runners to second and third, Hodges smashed his triple over Mike Finn’s head in center to give the Cavaliers the 3-2 lead. A bloop double from Aaron Barclay (2-for-3, two doubles, two runs scored) drove in Hodges. Barclay scored on Billy Godrick’s single to make it 5-2.
“We have some tough kids. They’re battle-tested. A lot of them played on the championship team from last year, so they know they have to respond there,” Spalding coach Joe Palumbo said. We did something that inning that we’ve been really struggling with, which is advancing runners, the situational hitting and the two-out hit. So that was refreshing for me to see.”
The Cavaliers still had some work to do to earn the win. Blohm yielded a leadoff double by Tyler Little to start the bottom of the fifth, then walked Dariel Torres to bring the tying run to the plate with the top of the Cardinals’ order coming up. But he got Jack Finn and Alex Kriss to strike out, and Hodges went a long way in right field to make his diving catch on a liner from Jeff Jones.
Blohm got the Cardinals out in order in the sixth inning to complete his strong outing.
“He was just attacking the zone,” Palumbo said. “They squared a couple balls early, they got the home run, but Tyler is a tough kid. He gave us six good innings, two runs, and that’s just his toughness, his willingness to get the ball over the plate and let his defense play for him.”
In the top of the second inning, Calvert Hall right fielder and cleanup hitter Nate Bosse had to leave the game after colliding with second baseman Gabriel Nieto on a short fly. Calvert Hall coach Lou Eckerl said Bosse left because of concussion-like symptoms but thought he would be fine. The Cardinals are already without senior ace pitcher Nick Delp.
“We played a very good team today,” Eckerl said. “They jumped up ahead of us, we came back and got ahead, and then they had the big inning. We had opportunities, but they played a little better than we did.”