Birds Blanked by Tigers

The up-and-down season for the Newton baseball team continued on Tuesday night, and unfortunately for the Cardinals and their dozens of supporters in attendance, it was a down night.

The Cards came out with some promise to start the night. Sophomore Tyler Wood rolled through the first inning with relative ease, getting ahead of hitters and pounding the strike zone, but the offense couldn’t figure out the ADM pitcher. The Cardinals fell 7-0 at home.

Wood got into trouble in the second inning. With runners at the corners and one man out, Wood picked up two big strikeouts to keep ADM scoreless. The third inning was rough, however, as Wood surrendered three straight hits to start the inning, including a triple and two singles. At the end of the third, the Cards trailed 4-0, and that was the end of Wood’s night.

Wood may have been fatigued from a basketball camp this past weekend, at least Newton co-coaches Pat Riley and Darin Tisdale certainly saw that as a main cause for the outing.

“Tyler was just tired tonight,” Tisdale said. “He had tired legs, and I don’t want to blame any particular person for it. It’s just one of those things that happens.”

“He had some trouble with the scheduling conflict,” Riley added. “With the basketball thing this weekend, he came out fatigued, and it really affected him.”

Following Wood’s exit, senior Jacob Hill entered the game, and he was not able to hold the ADM bats down, giving up three runs in his inning pitched. Hill gave up back-to-back walks to start the top of the fourth before getting a fly out to left. An error followed by a double and another error led to the runs given up.

“I thought Jacob did a pretty good job,” Tisdale said. “He had some bad luck. We have got to make some better plays behind him. We need to sharpen up defensively.”

The bottom line for this game was that the Cards could not hit ADM pitcher Ethan Herron, who struck out eight Cardinal batters and gave up only three hits.

Herron gave up a single to Wood to lead off the game, and the Cardinals did not see another ball drop in until the sixth inning, far from a winning formula.

“The way their guy was throwing, we didn’t take the approach we needed to,” Tisdale said. “We don’t have guys that are going to hit doubles and homers. We need to battle and foul off good pitches. We needed to go the other way with his pitches and take what we could get, but he was just so good tonight.”

The closest the Cards came to scoring was in the seventh inning, as they attempted to capitalize on Herron’s fatigue.

Michael Barr singled to start the frame and proceeded to steal second base. Derek Wrage walked with two outs, but a strikeout ended the game with the Cards shutout 7-0.

The one bright spot for the Cards on Tuesday was mopup pitcher Jordan Travis. Travis came on when the Cardinals were trailing 7-0 in the top of the fifth, and did a masterful job. Travis pitched three hitless innings and struck out four ADM batters, earning Tisdale’s praise.

“Jordan did just a phenomenal job coming in,” Tisdale said. “When he’s locating his pitches and has some movement as well, he’s got the chance to do what he did tonight. He’s really come a long way from where he was in JV.

ADM 7, Newton 0

A — 0 0 4 3 0 0 0 — 7

N — 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 — 0