Jackets break out the brooms for Hiram
With the help of a little bit of sunshine and a whole lot of offense, the Calhoun High School baseball team is back on a roll.
The state-ranked Yellow Jackets also stayed close to the head of the Region 7-5A standings with a three-game sweep of Hiram last week, scoring 42 runs combined against the Hornets to win them all by the mercy rule.
“It was a good week for us,” Calhoun High School Beau
Edwards. “The weather cooperated with us so we were able to get the games in with no problems. But, really, the kids hit the ball very well. And not just one or two guys, but a lot of different players. We hit the ball with authority. We had a lot of guys just step up to the plate and have a quality at-bat. It was really good to see.”
He said they tweaked a couple of things in batting practice to work on pitch selection and aggression and Edwards said he thought it worked.
“We just wanted to change things up a little bit in BP,” he said. “I’m a great believer that if you’re trying something and if you don’t like the result you are getting, then you need to change it up. And we didn’t like the results we were getting the last couple of games at the plate and so we decided to do something different.”
They began their sunny week last Tuesday with an 11-0 victory over Hiram as freshman pitcher Jax Bishop, in his first start in three weeks, and junior hurler Brooks Crawford combined to no-hit the Hornets.
Then they finished the sweep on Friday in Hiram, plating a season-high single-game 18 runs in an 18-1 victory that went just four innings in the first game of their doubleheader. Then they took the nightcap, 13-3, to keep the Hornets winless in Region play.
“It did feel good to win three games like that. And they were big games because they were Region games,” Edwards said. “But I felt like with this group, if we could just get back on the field and play some games, that we would be fine and we were.
I know on that bus ride home from Hiram, which is about an hour-and-10-minutes or so, it was a happy bus.”
In the first win on Tuesday, Bishop pitched the first four innings, striking out eight and walking just one while not allowing a hit. Crawford then tossed the fifth and K’d two of the three hitters he went against to finish the silence treatment against the Hiram hitters.
“They both pitched very well,” Edwards said. “That was one thing we wanted to do last week was get our pitching staff as much work as possible, even if it was after they pitched in a game. Like Jax, he pitched his four innings and when he came out, he went to the bullpen and threw some more.
“But we wanted to get our staff as much work as possible last week because we’ve had so few games recently and we’re in Region play, where we’re playing at least three games every week. So we’ve got some guys that we want to use and to sure they’re ready to go and have been pitching if we need them, because we don’t want to get caught in a spot somewhere down the road, where we want to go with a certain kid, but he hasn’t pitched in a long time. So we tried to use a few different guys last week.”
And while no one on the Calhoun side would ever complain about three easy wins, the offensive explosion they delivered against Hiram may have short-circuited those plans because none of the games went beyond six innings.
Kris Sutton led the 11-run uprising with a double and a triple and three RBI. Andon Lewis was also two-for-two and Ripken West was 2-for-3 with two runs driven in.
The Jackets broke the game open with five runs in the fourth inning.
Then in Game One on Friday, they had 18 hits, including five home runs, and scored a season-high 18 runs in an 18-1 pummeling of the Hornets in a game that went just four innings.
Sutton and Lewis each hit two dingers while Andrew Purdy added another one as seven different players had at least two hits in the game.
They also had an eight-run second inning to put the game away early.
“We showed up with the sticks for sure,” Edwards said. “It was our best offensive performance of the year. Everyone in the lineup was hitting the ball and usually hitting it hard. The fact that seven different players had multiple hits shows how well we were swinging it that game. But that was definitely was the best we’ve swung the bats in any single game this year.”
Junior Cooper Evans was the starting and winning pitcher and Issac Green threw the bottom of the fourth to end it. The Hornets would score their only run in the bottom of the third.
Then Calhoun came out with another excellent effort in the second game of the twinbill, using an eight-run third to get their second dominant Region 7-2A win in just a few hours.
“The hardest thing to do in this game is to win the second game of a doubleheader, but the kids played really well in that second game,” Edwards said. “I was a little concerned about it, but I probably shouldn’t have been because the kids came to play in both games. We really just kind of picked up where we left off from the first game to be honest, and that was good to see because we played so well in that first game.”
Once again, the offense erupted with Lewis going 3-for-3 with five RBI and another home run to give him seven on the season. Besides that, Green and Cooper were each 2-for-4 and Sutton added a
triple as it was never close after the visitors put an eight-spot on the scoreboard in the third.
The Jackets. who are presently the number-three ranked 5A team in the state according to the latest GHSA ratings, will look to extend their winning ways this week with a three-game Region series against Cass.
The teams met Tuesday night on Senior Night at Chip Henderson Field in the first game of the three-game set. (Details were not available at press time). Then they They will be at Cass Friday night for a doubleheader to complete the series with the first pitch of the evening set for 5 p.m.
“Hopefully we can continue to build on what we did last week,” Edwards said. “Hopefully, we can continue to swing the bats like we did and we can continue to pitch the way we have. I know everyone feels good about the way we were able to put things together last week, but the biggest thing is to keep it going.
“But (last Friday), against Hiram was definitely a fun night. Those were a couple of fun games, but we’ve got to put that behind us and come ready to play against a Cass team that I know can get you. So we need to come out and have another good week of games.”
Two teams — Cartersville and Blessed Trinity — are both undefeated after the first two weeks of Region 7-5A action. BT is 6-0 with three-game sweeps of Hiram and Cass while Cartersville is 4-0 with a three-game sweep of Woodland and a win over Calhoun
in their rain-shorted threegame series.
(The makeup games between Calhoun and Cartersville are set for Thursday, April 7 with a doubleheader between the two teams to start at 5 p.m. at Chip Henderson Field).
After those two unbeatens,
Calhoun is third in the Region with a 3-1 record while Cass is 3-3 overall. Woodland and Hiram are each off to a 6-0 start.
“I think the Region is playing out pretty much how we thought it would,” Edwards said. “But you’ve got some very good teams in there that
are playing well, so it’s going to be a grind and we’ve got to keep working. I know it’s early and there’s still a lot of games, but we’ve got to come out this week and play three good games because if we don’t, we’re going to be in trouble in this Region.”