Franklin’s baseball team squandered numerous opportunities in Wednesday’s home game against Greenwood. Given enough of them, though, the Grizzly Cubs eventually took advantage of one.
A five-run sixth inning broke open what had been a tight game and turned it into a 9-3 Franklin victory.
“We just started seeing the ball better,” Grizzly Cub junior Drew Doty said. “Pitchers made mistakes on their part, but then we capitalized and we started putting balls in the right spot.”
Grant Roberts led off the pivotal sixth with a double for the Grizzly Cubs (16-5, 10-2 Mid-State), and after Nolan Netter and Jackson Henry were both hit by pitches, Doty delivered a two-run single off of Luke Fiesel to stretch Franklin’s lead to 6-3. Henry then scored on a wild pitch before back-to-back RBI doubles by Jace Fowler and Max Clark capped the scoring.
Jackson Klem then pitched the seventh to close it out for winning pitcher Logen Devenport, who struck out six and scattered five hits over six innings.
“I was proud of the way we played. It was just that one inning,” Greenwood coach Andy Bass said. “We’ve got to learn, with an error or a walk or whatever, we’ve got to learn how to put the fire out instead of letting it just keep burning.
“We were right there; we’ve just got to get over that one inning.”
Until that one inning, the Woodmen (2-15, 1-11) were right in the ball game.
Franklin threatened in the first inning, loading the bases on an infield single by Clark and two-out walks to Roberts and Netter, but Woodmen starter Charlie Brooks managed to escape unscathed. Brooks wasn’t quite as fortunate in the second, when he allowed a leadoff double to Doty and walked Xavier Brown and Fowler to fill the bases again. Walks to Clark, Devenport and Netter all pushed runs across to give the Grizzly Cubs a 3-0 lead.
The Woodmen got two of those runs back in the top of the third when Justin Donenfeld singled, Chad Prentice walked and both came home on a Franklin error. In the fourth, Landen Smith singled, stole second, took third on a wild pitch and scored the tying run on an RBI groundout by Conner Stidham.
Fiesel, who relieved Brooks in the second, kept the Grizzly Cubs in check until the fifth, when a Fowler base hit with two out plated pinch runner Beau Baker and put the home club back in front by one. The Woodmen had a chance to strike back in the top of the sixth when Josh Miller and Alex Honeycutt reached on infield hits, but Devenport managed to get out of the jam and Franklin finally gave itself some breathing room in the bottom of the inning.
“We tried to bunt and two different guys didn’t get them down,” Bass said of Greenwood’s half of the sixth. “You get them down and move the runners, that changes everything and maybe shifts some momentum.”
Instead, Franklin was able to come away with a second straight win over the Woodmen, which Grizzly Cubs coach Ryan Feyerabend knew would be a much tougher feat than the conference standings might indicate.
“Greenwood’s record doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “We know they’re going to come in here every night, a well-coached ball club, and you know they’re going to scrap it out until the last pitch. That’s exactly what they did.
“We stayed at it. … You’ve just got to wait for a good pitch and be aggressive when you get it.”
