Baker holds off Mary Montgomery to win crucial series; Gatwood injured and status unknown

 

 

 

 

By JIMMY WIGFIELD

MOBILE — Humbled but not flustered by its worst loss of the season, No. 5-ranked Baker recovered to stave off Mary G. Montgomery 5-4 Friday night and moved to the threshold of the 7A Area 1 championship.

The Vikings walloped everything but their mothers in Friday’s opener, flattening the Hornets 13-1 and forcing Auburn signee and pro prospect Connor Gatwood to retreat after throwing 78 pitches in only 3.2 innings.

Scouts from at least nine Major League teams who crowded behind home plate at Larry Andrews Field clocked Gatwood’s fastball at 97 mph in the first inning but MGM’s Everett Coggin — in a sign of what was to come — slugged his first home run of the season to right field off Gatwood to give the Vikings a lead they never relinquished.

To add injury to insult, Gatwood injured his pitching hand when he fouled off a pitch in the fifth inning of Friday’s second game and his status is unknown.

“He got hit in the hand and we got ice on it,” Baker coach Tyler Minto said. “He’s going to the doctor and we’ll wait and see and hope for the best.”

Armed with the confidence provided by 10 hits in the opener, the Vikings took a 1-0 first-inning lead on Coggin’s RBI double in Friday’s second game but the Hornets replied with five runs in the bottom of the inning, then saw MGM gradually grind down the lead.

The Vikings’ Fuller Musgrove broke an 0-for-10 slump in the series by bouncing a homer off the fair side of the foul pole in left field with one out in the top of the seventh off reliever Ethan Santos to cut Baker’s lead to 5-4. But Santos kept his composure and struck out Coggin swinging for the second out and got Brody Tuinder to ground out to earn the save.

The Hornets (24-4, 4-1) need two victories over Davidson next week to win the 7A Area 1 championship. MGM (20-9, 3-2) would have to lose twice to Bryant to miss the playoffs as the runner-up.

Despite losing Friday’s opener on the mercy rule, surrendering a season-high 13 runs (nine of them earned) and having a 10-game winning streak shattered, Minto was pleased to see his team’s resolve.

“We’ve talked all year about having a no-quit attitude,” he said. “We didn’t show up as good as we could in Game 1 and hats off to Mary Montgomery. We came back with a positive response and I couldn’t be more proud of the kids. We trust these guys. They can handle adversity and that’s the biggest lesson we can teach them. A lot of teams would get rattled but we stayed even keeled.”

After the Vikings hit only four balls out of the infield against Bryant Durbin in a 4-0 loss in Thursday’s series opener, MGM coach Barry Hightower said his team was much more disciplined against Gatwood and Game 3 starter Bryson Sudduth. The Vikings finished with 18 hits in Friday’s doubleheader.

“We played hard,” Hightower said. “We hit the ball like that earlier this season but we’ve been through a slump. We really barreled some balls today. We wanted to look for balls we could handle in the strike zone. We’ve been chasing balls out of the zone but today we attacked the strike zone. If we go into a (playoff) series swinging the bats like that, it gives us a chance.”

Gatwood (3-2), the 6-foot-5 right-hander who had allowed just three hits in 12 innings this year, gave up five earned runs and five hits in 3.2 innings. He struck out seven and walked one.

“It’s still baseball,” Hightower said. “It’s see the baseball, hit the baseball. It’s a little harder against him but the ball’s still got to cross that 17-inch white plate. We were timing him well.”

Scouts from the Yankees, Cubs, Pirates, Blue Jays, Brewers, Mets, Reds, White Sox and Mariners were at the game but Minto said Gatwood wasn’t shaky.

“They’ve been coming out to see him since February,” Minto said. “They just hit him. They had a good approach against him. They were hunting fastballs and they tagged him a few times.”

Gatwood hit his sixth homer of the year in the bottom of the first to slice MGM’s lead to 2-1.

 

MGM 13,

Baker 1

 

The Vikings went through four Baker pitchers and scored six runs in the fourth and five more in the fifth to rout the Hornets in the series’ middle game.

No. 9 batter Koen Wilson hit a two-run ground-rule double in the fourth and finished with two hits and three RBIs. Trey Barnard had two hits and two RBIs, making the bottom third of the order 4-for-7 with five RBIs.

Justin Freind (3-1) had two hits and two RBIs and got the win, allowing four hits in five innings.

 

Baker 5,

MGM 4

 

In the series’ deciding game, the Hornets’ Micah Cornelius, who had gone 0-for-5 in the first two games, hit an opposite-field two-run single in the bottom of the first as Baker built a 5-1 lead.

After that, Slade Turner (6-1) pitched five scoreless, one-hit innings to steady the Vikings.

“Slade pitched good except for the first inning,” Hightower said.

MGM scored twice in the fifth and Musgrove’s homer in the seventh made it 5-4 before Santos got the save.

Sudduth (5-1) got the win, allowing three runs on seven hits in five innings. Durbin had two hits and an RBI.

Coggin had two hits and an RBI and Anderson Murray added two hits for Mary Montgomery.