ATHENS, Tenn. — East Hamilton is breaking in its new field with style, and the Hurricanes will play the school’s first postseason home baseball game Monday.
They assured themselves of that region semifinal game Tuesday when they shelled regular-season champion Soddy-Daisy 12-3 to secure the District 5-AAA championship.
“It feels great to know that we’ll be going home to play at least one more time. It’ll be the first playoff game on our campus, which will be great to have all of our students there,” winning pitcher Nick Woods said.
They did it with a season-high 14 hits — including a two-homer, six-RBI night from Josh Aslinger — and a complete-game five-hitter from Woods.
“If you hit like that, you’re going to win,” Hurricanes coach Steve Garland said. “There wasn’t anything magical about it. Pitchers missed their spots and hitters capitalized. Soddy-Daisy is a great team and we expect to see them roll next week.”
After East Hamilton scored three in its first at-bat on Aslinger’s three-run homer, Soddy-Daisy scrambled back to tie it on Grant Cordell’s two-run homer in the second and Dillon Clift’s solo shot in the third.
The Trojans had no time, though, for congratulatory slaps on the back.
The Hurricanes touched Soddy-Daisy pitcher Gavin Rogers for four runs in the third on an RBI double by Kyle Cox and Aslinger’s second three-run shot to left. His six RBIs provided a personal season high, and the two round-trippers tripled his season home run total.
“The first one was a 0-2 count. He threw me a curveball and hung it and I saw it well,” the junior said. “The second one the count was 1-2 and I got a fastball right down the middle. Yeah, I was pretty excited, but I wanted to stay humble about it.”
Aslinger credited improved bat speed, gained from batting-cage and ball-field practice with his dad, for Tuesday’s eruption.
With Woods settling in to throw shutout ball over the final four innings, his teammates gave him even more breathing room in the bottom of the fifth. He was involved there, too, as the Hurricanes scored five times on a two-run single from Matt Watters, Woods’ RBI single, an error and Nick Fahler’s double to right-center.
Woods had his best outing, striking out five and inducing four pop-ups and six groundball outs, one of which the Hurricanes turned into a double play.
“He probably has not been where he wanted to be all year,” Soddy-Daisy coach Jared Hensley said of Woods, who had ACL surgery last fall. “Today he was the player I expected him to be.”
Woods, quite often the Hurricanes’ closer, mixed curveball and slider with his fastball for the five-hitter. Having thrown 100 pitches in the first six innings, he knew going out for the seventh that he was limited.
“Coach Garland told me I had 15 more pitches and if I couldn’t get it done I was coming out. I knew the plan and was able to execute it,” Woods said.
It was a tough blow — again — for Soddy-Daisy.
“It seems like we’re much more often the bridesmaid rather than the bride,” Hensley said. “We’ve played for the district title six of the last seven years and have come in second five out of six times. We came in with high expectations and came up short.”
The Trojans appeared to be badly out of sync, and Hensley was among those that noticed.
“I’m not sure these guys always play for each other. I’m not so sure they have since the second week of the season,” he said.
He recalled a similar situation in 2011.
“Yeah, we had a similar talk with those guys,” he related. “They had five days to figure it out and we wound up finishing fifth in the state. So we may either do that or be taking up uniforms on Wednesday.”
Contact Ward Gossett at wgossett@timesfreepress.com or 423-886-4765. Follow him at Twitter.com/wardgossett.