By Jeremy McDonald

jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

STAYTON, Ore.–  Post 58 Crushers and Regis-grad Tanner Manning put it best, baseball is a game of a play or two.  And man, a play or two made a difference in the series opener between the Crushers and the Corvallis Marketmen.

The Marketmen used two Post 58 errors to their advantage to build themselves a 5-2 lead coming down to the seventh inning of Monday’s late afternoon contest.  Philomath’s Cameron Ordway, Karsten Sullivan and Cameron Cyrus all drove in RBI’s, Cyrus with a game-high 2RBI’s as West Albany’s Nate Marshall pitched another complete game performance in Area-3 League play at Regis.

“We came out hard and got some runs on the board, we felt a little laxidasical there at the end, but we picked it up at the end of the game,” Ordway said.23

It was one of those frustrating games for the Crushers, coming off a weekend where they went 3-1 in four games against Hawaii 18U and the Emerald Challengers, to see a solid all-around performance go on the away side.  Silverton’s Carson Waples went six innings, striking out four before Foxes teammate Aiden Goff finished off the game in holding the Corvallis crew to five hits to their seven as they couldn’t take advantage of the few baserunners that they had against Marshall on their home field.

“It’s a play of moments.  It’s frustrating when you play a team like Corvallis where you know they’re good, we hung with them pretty well and I felt like we could’ve won that game.  It was a matter of a couple of plays,” Manning said.

The Crushers put the fire to the Marketmen’s feet to the fire to finish the job in the bottom of the seventh however as they got two base runners on with no outs before loading  the bases with one out.  But the late game rally was broken up by a game-ending double play.  And despite the frustrating way to end the game, it was a good momentum boost for Post 58 going into Tuesday’s doubleheader at Corvallis High School.

“Momentum is what’s important.  We showed ourselves that we can hang with them, like don’t sleep on us sort of thing.  It was good to build up the momentum because we’ll come back tomorrow and see what’s going to happen right?” smiles Manning, who collected two hits and an RBI in the game.  “Hopefully we can keep the sticks going, tighten up in the field a little bit.  Our pitching was pretty good today and hopefully we can keep some of this momentum going into tomorrow.”

“That was huge, that got us on the right foot moving forward and I feel like that’s going to be a big confidence booster going forward,” adds Ordway.

For Corvallis, last time they held a Area-3 league doubleheader against the Post 20 Dirtbags, they suffered their lone two league defeats as the Dirtbags won the three-game series on the road.  Lessons were learned about bridging the first game’s success going into this doubleheader this time around.

“That we can’t take a team for granted and that we got to come out to play,” Ordway said.

The first game of the doubleheader starts at 5pm with the second game, Game 3 of the series, to follow.

Photos By Jeremy McDonald