A great baseball season was just a few errors away from being an even better season as the Area Champions fell to Stamford in the last two games of the two-out-of-three series last weekend in the Regional Quarterfinals.
The Broncos, who finished the season with an outstanding 19-6 record, took the first game 1-0 last Wednesday in Ralls.
According to coach Brad Elam, the Broncos did everything right in that first game.
“It was a great ballgame,” Elam said. “Great pitching and defense from both sides.
“We hit the ball decent, but weren’t able to push across any runs until the sixth when we did capitalize on their only error. Pitching and defense were the key and we played well.”
Game two was played on Saturday at Lubbock Christian High School and the Broncos lost 7-16.
“The game was not as bad as the score,” Elam said. “We had a 3-1 lead going into the sixth inning.”
According to Elam, Troy Chambless was on the mound and pitched four good innings.
“We just couldn’t get anything going on offense,” he said. “We had our chances, but the story of the day was not being able to drive runners in once they got into scoring position.”
Brayden Phillips and Troy Chambless each had two hits in the game, and Phillips drove in two runs and Chambless drove in three.
“The story of this game was the sixth inning,” Elam said. “We were up 3-1 with two outs in the sixth, (we had) a couple of missed opportunities, and they scored nine runs for the big lead.”
If the Broncos could have gotten past that inning, it might have been a completely different ending for the series.
Game three of the series was played immediately after game two with Stamford taking control early to get the 7-5 win.
“Again, missed opportunities cost us in this game,” Elam said. “We made some good defensive plays, but we did make too many errors and gave them too many runs. We picked a bad game to have our worst defensive game.”
Elam went on to say that they were able to do some positive things on offense but
were unable to push runs across early when they had runners in scoring position.
“We had runners on all game, (and) we had 15 hits and four walks but couldn’t get enough timely hits.
“We had a chance the last inning, with two runners on, but were not able to score them.”
He noted that Colter Goolsby, Johnny Gaines, Brady Miller, and Caleb Mitchell all had three hits in the game. Miller drove in four runs and hit great in the playoffs.
“We had chances in both games to win but were not able to get it done,” Elam said.
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