This baseball team isn’t just clicking − it’s steam rolling people. On Wednesday evening, for the ninth straight game, St. Anne’s-Belfield run-ruled its opponent with Quinn Saunders spinning together a complete game shutout while the bottom of the order provided the bulk of the run support in a 10-0 victory over Christchurch.
“That was a quality win for us,” said Saints coach Alan Swanson. “Quinn threw strikes and went right after batters, we didn’t make any errors and the guys put the ball in play.”
Saunders set the tone in the first inning by striking out the side, and after he surrendered his first hit of the game – a leadoff triple to open the second – he fanned three of the next four batters to escape the only adversity he saw all game.
“I just had to buckle down there,” Saunders said of his work in the second. “I knew that every pitch was important and didn’t want to leave anything up so I tried to keep it down in the zone. Even an out pitch could give up a pop fly and score a run so I didn’t want that to there. So I worked in on the batters and tried to keep them off-balance and get a few fastballs by them.”
Squaring off against a highly recruited pitcher in Michael Taylor, STAB opened up the scoring in the bottom of the second when Dustin Baelow hammered a pitch on a 3-0 count from Taylor over the left field fence.
“We had (Charlie Murray) on base and he was doing a great job of distracting (Taylor),” Baelow said. “So it got to 3-0 because Charlie was running so much and I knew a fastball was coming in. So I had to put a good piece of wood on it and it just got out of here.”
Sheldon Shifflett then picked up the first of his three hits on the day and worked his way around the basepaths before taking home on a wild pitch.
In the bottom of the third Brian Yeagle went yard on the first pitch he saw to put St. Anne’s up 4-0. The lead increased to five runs in the fourth after another Shifflett single and an RBI double from John Siciliano.
Then in the fifth, the Saints decided to wrap things up early with a 5-run inning that included an RBI single from Baelow, a 3-run inside-the-park homerun from Shifflett before Siciliano scored the game ending run when we ran home on another wild pitch.
Saunders sat down 10 of the 18 batters he faced and threw just 62 pitches. Of those 62 pitches, 45 went for strikes and of those 45 strikes, 14 of them were on the first pitch of an at-bat.
Baelow and Shifflett, the eighth and ninth batters in the order, managed to respectively go 2 for 3 with three RBIs and two runs scored, and 3 for 3 with three RBIs and three runs scored. Siciliano went 3 for 4 with a pair of doubles and an RBI. Saunders was 2 for 4. Yeagle put together a 2 for 3 performance.
STAB (22-2) has won 19 straight games and not lost since March 23. The Saints host Woodbery Forest on Friday at 5 p.m. before beginning VISAA tournament play next Tuesday with a home game.
