AUBURN – After several years of inconsistent baseball and struggling to find its stroke, the Leavitt High School baseball team has come alive. Wednesday’s victim: Edward Little.
Alex Cutter went 3-for-3 with two walks, two runs scored and an RBI and Chad Schrepper went 4-for-5 with two RBI and a run scored to lead the Hornets to a 10-7 win over the Red Eddies at Austin Field. The win is the fourth in a row for Leavitt after it scored just one run in three consecutive losses to open the season.
“This is the first time in five years we are scoring runs on a consistent basis,” Leavitt coach Dave Morin said. “Last year if we gave up five, six, seven runs we’d lose for sure, and we certainly never used to get bounces.”
A strange hop in the second helped the Hornets (4-3) fly out to a 7-2 lead after two innings when a Dustin Gilbert hit ricocheted off of the first-base bag with two outs and the bases loaded to plate two runs and keep the inning alive. Leavitt sent 11 batters to the plate in the second inning and drove six of them home.
“Even with the big inning we had, we could have had a lot more,” Morin said. “We left the bases loaded twice tonight.”
Edward Little (1-5), down 9-2 after five innings, started to mount a charge in the sixth. Justin Ciszewski led off that inning with a home run to left field, and Nick Taylor and Matt Nadeau followed by reaching on an error and a walk. They both made it home to pull the Red Eddies to within four at 9-5. A base-running gaffe with the bases loaded and one out halted the team’s momentum, though, when David Chesley tried to score from third on a ball in shallow centerfield. Schrepper, Leavitt’s center fielder, picked up the ball and fired a strike to Gilbert behind the plate, who tagged Chesley to end that threat.
“It was a bang-bang decision,” EL coach Scott Annear said. “It’s easy to look back and say we shouldn’t have sent him, but the way we have been scoring runs lately, we were just looking at an opportunity to score.”
Leavitt added one more in the top of the seventh and EL plated two in the bottom half, but Chesley fanned on a pitch with a runner on second to end the game.
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