Rockville blows out Eagles baseball

The South Putnam Eagles' baseball team struggled again Tuesday night like they have most of the season, while they hosted Rockville.

It started off well, but outfielder Joe Waters took a ball to the face and after that it was game over. They lost 22-3 in six innings.

"We struggled tonight," Eagles' coach Zack Love said, "We kind of got ourselves down when one of our leaders, Joe Waters, went down with an injury. From there we had trouble regrouping.

The bats were unable to provide for South Putnam (5-11, 3-5 WCC) who managed to only chisel off seven hits.

"We had trouble stringing it together tonight," Love said, "We put some runners on, we moved some runners around, but we left some runners out there. That was a bit frustrating."

"We got ourselves back into in there in the bottom of the fifth inning," Love said, "We gave ourselves a chance to keep playing. That one bad inning was kind of the story of the game."

"For the time being" was all that could be said for the Eagles. Rockville responded with its best effort of the night driving in 12 runs to depress the opponent.

"Like I said I just think that when one of our leaders like Joe Waters goes down we just panicked a little bit," Love said, "We've just got to learn to grow from this. We've got a couple conference showdowns next week and we got to go for that."

South Putnam held the Rox scoreless into the second inning, but with one run in Rox sophomore Dalton Laney hit a grand slam. This tallied four of the six runs in the inning and put South Putnam in a jam.

Not only did the bats struggle for the Eagles, their pitching did not hold up as well.

They had to sort through five different pitchers.

Their longest outing was given to sophomore Grady McHugh who pitch four plus innings.

Rockville got McHugh out of his comfort zone and chewed eight hits and five walks off of him. He also had eight runs charged to his name.

Over the final two innings the Eagles went through four pitchers and the result was the same.

Rockville kept hitting and driving in runs.

The South Putnam pitching command also helped the Rox. They patiently waited out 16 walks.

"We had trouble finding the strike zone," Love said, "Baseball is a mental game. I felt like there were some times we lost our mental focus. When we started to struggle it all kind of added up against us."

This was a tough team to face for the Eagles and it proved to be too much for the starting pitcher who is only a sophomore.

WP: Clark (R)

LP: McHugh (SP)

HR: Laney (R, Grand Slam), Ty. Long (SP, 3-run)