By the fifth inning of Tuesday’s Area 1 East Region American Legion baseball playoff game between Pitt County Post 39 and Wayne County Post 11, some young fans shifted their attention from the game to a bucket of sidewalk chalk.
Several young girls were taking turns drawing chalk outlines of themselves on the pavement behind home plate at South Central High School.
The 39ers lost, 14-4, though the chalk outlines for the season can wait at least another day. Wayne County, with the win, opened up a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series.
The third game was set to be played Wednesday night at Eastern Carolina Athletic Park in Goldsboro, with a potential if-necessary Game 4 set for Thursday at South Central.
“Just got to flush it,” Post 39 coach Christian Stokes said after the loss. The message that we preached to the pitching staff is they have to be in the zone and have to compete. And when that doesn’t happen, it kind of looks like that. So that’s a hard lesson to learn that way, but it’s just how it goes. When we are filling the zone it looks like it did in the second, third and fourth innings.”
Stokes, a South Central grad and former Post 39 legion ball player, is in his first season coaching the squad. An assistant baseball coach at South Central during the school year, Stokes took over legion duties from Ryan Meadows.
Stokes said he is learning on the job, but that this experience has been rewarding and eye-opening as he and the team navigate the postseason for the first time together.
Tuesday’s start wasn’t what Post 39 envisioned, but Pitt County did battle and make it game in the middle innings.
Starting pitcher Christian Chance was tagged for five runs in the top of the first inning, but he was far from done. Chance settled in after the shaky first inning and was dominant at times in the middle innings, pitching into the fifth.
The right-hander blew away hitters with a big fastball early in his outing, before working backward and mixing in a bending curveball and more offspeed pitches as the game wore on. Chance helped his cause at the plate, too, by collecting three RBIs.
Chance smacked an RBI single in the second inning, then added a two-run single in the fourth to cut the deficit to 6-3 at the time. The right-hander left the mound with two outs in the top of the fifth after a Wayne County RBI double and a 7-3 lead.
“When he gets a feel for the situation and how he’s feeling that day he is one of the most dynamic pitchers. He’s overpowering,” Stokes said of his starter. “I mean, you really can’t say more than that. When he’s got his stuff, he is very hard to hit. When he’s controlling whatever he wants to in and out of the zone, he’s just dominant.
“When he doesn’t have it, and he’s trying to place that one pitch or come back from a 3-0 count, then he becomes hittable like most guys. And when he becomes hittable, guys are gonna hit the ball hard because he’s not throwing it slow.”
With Chance out of the game, Wayne County opened up an insurmountable lead by pouring in seven runs in the top of the sixth for a 14-3 lead. Post 11 collected seven hits in the inning and mixed in a few walks to take a commanding lead in the series.
Pitt County must stave off elimination on Wednesday to force another home game on Thursday.
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