By Jeremy McDonald

jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

STAYTON, Ore.– Being an young, up-and-coming team has a lot of bumps in the road to success.

The Stayton Eagles Baseball team saw their first bump in that road to success Wednesday afternoon with four freshman starting in the lineup and a fifth coming off the bench in their 9-3 loss to Blanchet Catholic.

But, Head Coach Drew Heard liked how his team persevered through the adversity they faced in their Season and Home Opener.
“Even though we played five freshman today, the team, I don’t think they played scared,” Heard said.  “I thought that they had things to learn and they made some freshman mistakes, I was proud in the way that we preserver through those mistakes.”

Senior Matt Lindemann knew the jitters were there for his young team, but the Eagles are going to use this game as a confidence booster for their Tournament next week and for the rest of the season.

“It was our first game so I thought we came out and got all the jitters out and what not, to get ready for next week with our tournament,” said Lindemann.  “So our first game got cancelled, we were hoping to come out better this game, but we got it out of the way so we can look forward to the rest of the season.”

The jitters were there in full force in the opening frame of the game as the Cavaliers capitalized on several Eagle errors to build a 4-0 lead entering the bottom of the first inning.

Stayton would respond however from their first at-bat as Everett St. Clair sent a power shot to the center field fence for a triple.

The Eagles had cut the Blanchet Catholic to 4-2 entering the second, but the Cavs extended their lead back to four by the end of the third, 7-3.

For much of the next three innings, the game was a chess match between defenses.  A strikeout here, a single there, a groundout happens to be match by another hit.

“It’s just timing up the pitches and stuff,” said Lindeman on the middle frames.  “We haven’t faced a real pitcher; we weren’t sure which ones were slow, which one’s were fast or what they have.

“As soon as we got one time through the lineup, we just got used to live pitchers and what they were doing.  So I think we were fine after the jitters out and facing a real pitcher.”

Stayton however, weren’t able to duplicate their first two innings of offensive power for the reminder of the game.

“We just let them score way too much at the very beginning,” said Lindemann.  “We dug ourselves in a hole right off the bat.  So if we were able to give ourselves some good defense, missing some easy routine plays and stuff like that, if we wouldn’t have done that, we would’ve been in the game.”

Despite giving up two more runs in the top of the seventh inning, Heard was very pleased with how his team performed and knows that the mistakes from today will not happen as the Eagles gain some more experience this season.

“I have to check the book, but I don’t believe that they scored an earned run.  So we gave up nine unearned runs,” said Heard.  “Obviously if we tighten some things up defensively, we weren’t having the same score as we had.

“There were some situations where we had times where we didn’t understand what we needed to do from a situational standpoint.  Sometimes the best decision is to get an out and we tried to make plays that ended up hurting us because we were trying to make plays and that’s just getting older and gaining experience and understanding the situations.”

PHOTO GALLERY (PICTURES BY JEREMY MCDONALD)

Jeremy McDonald is a professional sports journalist in the Salem/Portland area and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalist in Oregon with B.S. degrees from Southern Oregon University in Journalism (2011) and Health/PE (2013).  Got a story idea? Email him at jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com or on Twitter at @J_McDonald81