The Mount Hebron Vikings were hearing the ping of hard hit balls leaving their bats, Wednesday afternoon, but they couldn’t seem to hit the gaps at Glen Burnie High School.
That is until the sixth inning, when the Vikings scored four runs to overcome a 2-0 deficit, and held on through the final innings to earn a 5-3 baseball win.
“We had some hard hit balls but they were just hit at people,” Viking coach Brian Culley said of his team’s early performance. “You could see things were going well, but we were just getting bad luck. Baseball is a funny game, and the baseball gods did us good here, one time.”
The baseball gods donned upon the Vikings back-to-back walks in the sixth inning, sandwiched between two outs, but that was when work was really done.
Slapping a two-out, two-run double to right field, Matt Baker scored the Vikings’ first two runs of the game when knocking in Justin Garber and Tommy Schenk, and scored on a dropped third strike just one batter later for the team’s third run.
“From the beginning of the game we just wanted to get to their bullpen,” Baker said. “I just tried to work a good count and get a pitch I wanted, and he gave me a fastball and I just hit it out to right field.”
Andrew Giuliani round-up the scoring inning, driving in Tyler Anthony on his own double for a 4-2 lead, and Justin Garber would later drive in the Vikings final run in the seventh.
“The boys and I have been talking about playing a full, complete game, and we have had very little time, so it has been mostly learning on the field,” Culley explained. “They came out, things weren’t looking good early, but what I’m proud of most is that they didn’t stop playing hard. They played the game the way it is supposed to be played, and some things began falling for us.”
Not allowing the Gophers to dig in during any innings, Giuliani pitched the complete-game win while allowing just three single-score runs, seeing scores in the third, fifth and seventh.
“I was just throwing fastballs,” Giuliani said of his success on the mound. “I was hoping my defense would help me out, which they did, and my curveball started working later in the game and had their team off balance.”
Giuliani held the Gophers scoreless through numerous innings by earning at least one strikeout in six of the seven innings, and had catcher Steven Schultz gun-down a base-runner attempting to take second in the first inning.
Glen Burnie got on the board first in the third inning, scoring Tyler Gilbert on an errant throw, and took a 2-0 lead in the fifth when Chade Lane knocked in a walked Bryan Scheppske.
“We got complacent with a two run lead and made some crucial physical mistakes that they were able to take advantage of,” Glen Burnie coach Bruce Sider said, “and that’s how we ended up on the short end of the stick, today.”
After falling victim to the four-run sixth inning, Glen Burnie was further hindered by a stranded runner on third to end the sixth, and only had one score from Gilbert after posting his won triple to start the seventh.
“We have to come out tomorrow and finish a game and finish on top,” Sider said of his Gophers, who nest see North County in Thursday baseball action
The Vikings will have Thursday to regroup, but will then go hard into the weekend.
“We will take this into tomorrows practice and then we play a couple games over the weekend,” Culley said. “We will take this, learn from the mistakes and expand from it and feel good.”
Mount Hebron 5, Glen Burnie 3
MTH 0 0 0 0 0 4 1 — 5
GB 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 — 3
