Seymour’s baseball team broke loose for five runs on three hits in the third inning, and four runs on four hits in the fifth inning and coasted over Charlestown 10-2 on Tuesday at American Legion Field.
Owls coach Jeremy Richey said he was happy to see his team pound out 12 hits by eight different batters.
“Twelve hits is a good night,” he said. “We’ve been swinging the bats a lot better here lately. The lineup is getting better and better every week. We’re excited about that. We put a lot of things together and created some problems for them.
“There were a couple other innings out there (when the Owls left runners on base). We had runners on second and third with nobody out in the first and got nothing out of it. We had other opportunities and we’ve got to be better in those situations. I think we did a nice job in those (third and fifth) innings. We need to finish those innings because we had more runs out there.”
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The Owls left eight runners on base.
Seymour missed an excellent scoring opportunity in the first inning when Alan Perry singled, and stole second and third, and Takumi Nishiwaki walked, and Seth Maki walked to load the bases before the Pirates turned a double play.
Perry’s stolen bases gives him 49 for his career and moves him past David Bullard and to No. 1 on the all-time list.
“We’re getting close to 70 stolen bases this year,” Richey said. “We’ve applied some pressure. Alan did a nice job early on running the bases.”
Perry doubled, Nishiwaki walked and A.J. Boshears was hit by a pitch to load the bases in the third, and Maki doubled off the fence in left-center to clear the bags to make it 3-0.
Maki scored on a passed ball, and Ty McCory walked and was replaced by courtesy runner Alex Holt, who scored on a passed ball for the fourth run in the inning.
Owls’ sophomore right-hander Braden Christopher had a no hitter through one out in the fourth when Brendan Brainard beat out a bunt and scored on a single by Rhett Kaelin.
Christopher went six innings and allowed five hits, two earned runs, he struck out three and walked one.
“He did a great job,” Richey said. “We were trying to get him through four or five, but he kept throwing so well and had some quick innings to extend him to six. We could have thrown him in the seventh if we needed to, but we wanted to give Matthew (Moore) a shot. We may need him moving into the weekend.”
With two out and nobody on in the fifth, Moore, Jayden Brown and R.J. Kleber had hits to load the bases, and Perry singled to drive in two runs. Perry later scored on an error.
Jake Roberts was safe on a fielder’s choice in the sixth and scored on Tiller Cummings’ single.
Perry and Maki led the offense. Perry had two singles and a double, three RBIs and he scored two runs, and Maki had a double and single, three RBIs and he scored one run. Moore also had two hits and scored one run.
The Owls had a couple base-running mistakes resulting in a double play in the first inning and a runner tagged out between first and second base in the fifth inning.
“The base-running mistakes, I’ll live with that,” Richey said. “That’s two times being aggressive. With a runner in front of them going to third we tried to get their attention and they made a nice play throwing a guy out at second.”
The Owls dropped a fly ball and misplayed a ground ball for errors.
“We’ve got to clean those errors up,” Richey said. “We have not been very sharp defensively the last week or so. I think as our offense has gotten better the defense has started to suffer and we’ve got to clean that up. We had a couple early and played a lot better after that. Hopefully that’s a sign of what’s to come.”
Michael Knecht made an excellent running catch into right-center and threw to second base to double a runner off second for a double play in the first inning. “That was good timing on that,” Richey said.
The Owls (14-8) will play Richmond at 5:30 Friday in the Richmond Tournament.