Because ESPN2 must have something to show on Tuesday night, I watched part of the men’s basketball game between High Point and Arkansas State.
It’s the Ro College Basketball Invitational, live from Daytona Beach Center. High Point, the regular-season champion of the Big South, was up seven the last time I checked.
Presbyterian (14-19) played in that tournament on Sunday.
When the TV announcers previewed the game, not one person was sitting in the stands behind them. The crowd appeared to be about the size of a typical Wednesday-night PC game.
So what was it good for? It occurs to me that playing there may help keep the Blue Hose’ promising team together.
Furman didn’t play after the Southern Conference Tournament, and the Paladins just lost four to the transfer protocol.
I’m grasping for straws here.
It’s not unusual for me to miss something. I get home from one game, start looking up the progress of other games, sometimes games scheduled for Tuesday are moved up to Monday, and games on Tuesday are moved back to Wednesday, and sometimes there’s a game being played and I don’t catch it.
Take right now, for instance. It’s been raining all over, and my cell just informed me that somehow the Laurens JVs are playing J.L. Mann.
Glory be.
Last night I picked up Clinton playing baseball but not Clinton playing softball.
I catch up as best I can.
Not only did the Red Devils play softball on Monday night.
I remember an old Shoe strip in the funny papers from at least 40 years ago. The title character, a grumpy newspaperman who happened to be a bird, “pecking” away at a typewriter on the branch of a tree, was cranking out a rundown of the day’s NFL games.
“The Packers inched by the Browns 17-14 … the Jets flew past the Broncos 34-17 … the Redskins scalped the Cowboys 28-10 … the Rams pulverized the Bills 42-3 …”
Shoe scratched his head and typed, “… and the Lions ‘dekrelnificated’ the Oilers 37-7.”
The Red Devils dekrelnificated the Emerald Vikings, 18-0.
Clinton (7-5, 1-3 Region 4-3A) turned around three straight tight losses in one fell swoop, which translated to two segments at the plate, because the Red Devils scored 11 runs in the first inning and seven in the second. They ran 12 hits up the nearby flagpole.
One doesn’t not often tout a no-hitter on the statistical sample of three innings in the circle, particularly when Me-Me Smith, Cat Wilkie and Sierra Templeton stopped the Vikings one inning apiece. The box score said Smith was the winner for the first.
Emerald didn’t get any hits, but the they did make three errors.
In those two innings Clinton batted, Smith managed a single, a double and a triple. Taylor Davis lashed a double and was 2/2. Alyssa Young blasted a triple. Maddie Butler was 2/3.
Seven walks didn’t hurt. Emerald (1-8, 0-3) got its two baserunners that way.
Laurens’ junior-varsity baseball team finally met its match in J.L. Mann, but the Raiders didn’t go down quietly.
Laurens (8-1) spotted the Patriots a 5-1 lead after four innings but narrowed the lead to 5-3 by scoring runs in the fifth and sixth. Mann put LDHS away with two in the top of the seventh.
Preston Dixon’s first-inning RBI single briefly put the Raiders ahead, but the Greenville school took the lead for good by scoring in the second and third. Josh Carlson’s single gave the Patriots the lead.
Dixon went 2/3 for Laurens, which got only four singles off three Mann hurlers. Carlson was the winning pitcher. Carter McAdams closed out the Raiders on the mound and had the game’s only extra-base hit, a double.
Laurens committed three errors and its pitchers issued eight walks. Starter Karson Vinson took the loss.
Presbyterian gave 18th-ranked South Carolina a battle but lost, 19-14, in Columbia as the Blue Hose left the bases loaded in the top of the ninth inning on Tuesday night.
The teams combined for 33 runs, 25 hits, two errors and 20 runners left on base.
Brody Fahr singled in a run, and Jay Wetherington, who had been hit by a pitch, scored on a fielder’s choice before the game ended on Jake Randolph’s grounder to short.
The Gamecocks scored seven runs on five hits in the first inning. Home runs by Parker Noland, Ethan Petry and Dalton Reeves, successively drove in one, two and three runs.
Petry homered again in the second inning. Reeves encored his in the fourth. Veach, the eighth hurler to toe the rubber for South Carolina (20-5), retired the final out on the mound. He and Reeves are both former Blue Hose (11-14).
Take a look at the box here.
Will work for food, but contributions would be better. They’re both good and good for me.
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