Tim Clement was contagious Wednesday night.
The Central pitcher refused to give in and he capitalized every time a Red Bank batter made a mistake, forcing at least a half-dozen harmless pop-ups while striking out eight. He gave the Purple Pounders an eight-strikeout complete game and they gave him a 2-1 win over District 6-AA favorite Red Bank with a run in the bottom of the seventh.
“Tim kept us in the game. We got in some big jams, and he pitched us out of them,” Central coach Glen Carter said.
The Purple Pounders scored a run in the third and nursed it through six innings. Red Bank, which jammed a season’s worth of mistakes into this one game, finally tied it thanks to a pair of seventh-inning Central errors.
But Red Bank returned the favor in the bottom of the inning. With one out, Austin Temple worked his third walk of the night and Chad Archey beat out a bunt down the first base line. Lions reliever Tyler Stott got the second out with a strikeout but then Preston Womack sliced a fly ball to right that squirted out of the fielder’s glove, plating Temple with the winning run.
Including Archy’s sacrifice attempt that turned into a single, Central had but two hits off Stott, who pitched the seventh, and Red Bank starter Gunter Barton. The two hits, the other Preston Scott’s RBI single in the third, figured into both of Central’s runs. But scoring runs hasn’t come easily for the Pounders.
“We’re no offensive juggernaut,” Carter said. “This game tonight – that’s us. That’s the way we play. We get runners on and try to pressure them around.”
Clement stranded 10 Red Bank runners, seven of them in scoring position. He had inning-ending strikeouts in the first – when Red Bank had runners on first and second – and in the fourth when the Lions had a runner aboard. He struck out the side in the fourth and induced a two-out, bases-loaded fly ball to end the top half of the seventh.
Clement threw more than 130 pitches, obviously succeeding in talking his way back onto the mound. If it hadn’t been a game against the preseason favorite, he would never have been allowed to go that far.
“I think I’ll sleep well tonight,” he said.
That’s more than one can say for Lions coach Bumper Reese. If his dog had been in the dugout, the coach might’ve kicked him. At one point he walked way down the left-field line almost to the foul pole to keep from venting his anger and to choke down his frustration.
“It was a night of blown opportunities,” he said. “(Central) tried to give it to us and we wouldn’t take it. We couldn’t put the ball in play. We missed signs. We weren’t paying attention, and it was all night long. Without a doubt this is our worst game. I don’t know if we can play any worse.”
Regardless, the Lions surrendered their unbeaten district status, falling to 3-1 and now tied with at least Central.