Saxony Lutheran senior pitcher Eli Brown had everything working on Saturday. Brown struck out 20 batters to help secure a 9-0 season opening victory over Bloomfield at Saxony Lutheran High School.
Brown pitched a complete game, and along with the 20 strikeouts, he gave up just one hit and Bloomfield had five total base runners on the day.
“For someone to go out there and be that impressive and that dominant is masterful,” Paul Sander said. “I’ve never seen that in my 15 years of coaching in May let alone March. It was fun to watch.”
The first Bloomfield batter got on base thanks to a dropped third strike and reached third base on a sacrifice bunt. Brown was able to pitch around that in for the rest of the game, was a dominant pitcher.
Brown only allowed two runners to reach base from the second to sixth inning, one thanks to an error
“He had all his pitches going,” Sander said. “A lot of people don’t see him all the time, but he’s got at least four pitches that he can locate at any time. When you have that many pitches, that can be difficult for high school kids.”
The Saxony offense got on the board in the first inning with some help from the Bloomfield pitching. A walk and two hit batsmen allowed two runs to score and Zac Lewis singled home a run to give Saxony a 3-0 lead.
That was all Brown really needed.
Saxony scored three more runs in the fourth and fifth innings respectively as they smashed just six hits in the ball game and were helped by a trio of Bloomfield errors in the game.
Six different players for Saxony had hits, while Will LeDure had two RBI. Sander hopes his batters can get on track has Crusader hits struck out a collective 10 times in the contest.
“We didn’t hit the ball very well,” Sander said. “The bats are usually behind the pitchers at this point in the season, but I thought we did a poor job of reading the curveball early in the game and took a lot of called third strikes. We struck out a lot, but we really haven’t seen a lot of curveballs. Everything in the cage is 90 percent fastballs.”
Saxony will get plenty of time to correct everything as the game kicked off a stretch of six games in eight days, including the Kickoff Classic which begins today.
