North Putnam baseball sees home loss

ROACHDALE --Still trying to experiment with new positioning and players Saturday morning, the North Putnam Cougars' baseball team could not find a solution.

The Lebanon Tigers roared fiercely to victory 19-6 in six innings.

"It went very rough," assistant coach Brian Jeter said, "We're still trying kids at different positions.

"We're still switching around with the lineup. We're trying to get some younger pitchers in and trying to see what we got for the long stretch of the season."

The Cougar infield committed more than five errors, which led to 13 runs.

"We're going to let them play through it," Jeter said, "We've decided if they're going to make errors we're going to let them play through it. We'll let them try to adjust. Right now our goal is county and sectionals. That is still in play so we got that to play for."

The Cougars are trying to get new and inexperienced members on the field and for now it is not working.

With one out in the top of the third inning Lebanon had a runner on third, Nathan Kincaid, and a runner on first, Bryce Shearer. Cougar pitcher Max Haste tried to pick off Shearer, but while Kincaid started for home all the Cougars cared about was the runner between first and second.

It allowed Kincaid to score easily with no distractions.

"I believe there was one out and we needed to go ahead ang try to get the second out," Jeter said, "A ground ball or base hit was going to score him anyway, so we wanted to go ahead and get an out to advance through the line up."

With a 10-run deficit in the fifth North Putnam scored a run to stop the 10-run threat, but a five-run Lebanon sixth inning forced it anyway.

Having a small bullpen also put North Putnam to its test.

They had two possibly three guys they were comfortable using, but they had to use four in the game.

They allowed a total of 19 hits. Trae Straziscar also gave up a homer to Colton Ranney in the fifth.

"We played Wednesday night, Friday night and we played now," Jeter said, "We have this next game and two conference games coming up and we don't have enough arms for this constricted schedule."

They saved freshman Jack Kendall to start game two, but after that everything was up in the air.

When a coach has to say is that the only good thing is the sun came up, you know it was not a good day.

Cougars' baseball coach Phil Webster said just that.

His team embarrassingly lost 27-3 to the Lebanon Tigers in the second game of a double header Saturday.

"We did not play well," Webster said, "We made too many mistakes and you can't win baseball when you make too many mistakes."

The Cougars hung around in the first inning of game two keeping it tied at three, but the Tigers shut them out from there.

The Tigers gathered 27 hits along with 24 more runs calmly and made their way to victory.

North Putnam only got a total of nine men on base.

"They hit the ball hard," Webster said, "If you lack ecperience or confidence to yourself, sometimes those balls get through."

Coty Edwards homered in the second inning of the game and Caleb Myers homered twice, one in the third and once in the fourth for the Tigers.

The experimenting has not gone well for the Cougars and this may have not been a good confidence builder playing two of the best teams in Indiana between Tri-West and Lebanon.

"We just want to get kids to play," Webster said, "We switched kids around and they came back out with their starting line up. We didn't want kids to be out here for three or four hours without getting a chance to play. It's not a conference game or a sectional game, so we pretty much let everyone play."

Lb 521 155 --19 19

NP 301 020 --6 5

WP: Bland (L)

LP: Nauert (NP)

HR: Ranney (L)

Lb 33957--27 27

NP 30000--3 5

WP: Starkey (L)

LP: Kendall (NP)

HR: Edwards (L), Myers 2 (L)