Perryville baseball played on the big stage and came away with a victory on Saturday.
The Pirates took advantage of several errors and had a big second inning as they walked away with a 9-4 win over Rowva-Williamsfield at Busch Stadium on Saturday.
The Pirates took the field right after the St. Louis Cardinals took on the Milwaukee Brewers, and scored more runs (and wins) in the one game than the Cardinals did the entire weekend. With the victory, the Pirates equaled the win total from the 2023 season.
Perryville did much of the damage in the second inning, where the team score eight runs and sent 13 batters to the plate in the inning.
Adam Green started the inning with a triple to left field, and then scored on the first of three errors Rowva-Williamsfield committed in the inning. The Cougars committed five errors in the game. The inning continued with a walk and another error, which brought up Eli Derickson who singled in two runs, and another on a wild pitch, which gave the Pirates a 4-0 lead.
Perryville took advantage of three consecutive walks, the last by Grant Smith plated a run and then Dalton Fritsche was hit by a pitch to give Perryville a 6-0 lead.
Perryville scored the last two runs of the inning on RBI groundouts by Tyler Jannin and Waylon Huber.
Huber drove in the final run of the day for Perryville on a single, which gave the Pirates a 9-0 lead at the time. The Cougars rallied in the bottom half of the inning for their first run.
Not much went wrong for Perryville, as 17 players got at least one at-bat in the game and five players pitched as it was Coach Donald O’Keefe’s plan to give everyone a chance to get into the game at such a special location.
At the plate, Troy O’Keefe, Fritsche, Green, Derickson, and Huber each collected hits as Perryville mustered five on the day, and took advantage of other miscues.
On the pitching side of things, the Pirate pitchers were throwing well. As a unit Perryville pitchers struck out 13 Cougar batters. Evan Hayden led the way, throwing two innings, gave up one hit, one run, with six strikeouts. Huber went 2 1/3 innings, and struck out three batters. Logan Hoehn also struck out three of the four batters he faced.
