Warren Central drops Game 1 with Northwest Rankin

Published 4:17 am Friday, April 29, 2016

Every line drive Warren Central hit Thursday night seemed to curve right into a glove. Every one hit to them seemed to squirt underneath or clank off of a glove.

Pitches missed by an inch, tags were a split second too late, and things quickly spiraled out of control.

It’s the kind of nightmarish game every team has at some point in a season, and for the Vikings it came at the worst possible time.

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Warren Central committed a season-high six errors that led to six unearned runs and a 10-0 loss to Northwest Rankin in Game 1 of a second-round Class 6A playoff series at Viking Field.

“I haven’t seen that team all year. We just had a bad night, and it got bad quick and in a hurry,” Warren Central coach Conner Douglas said. “We’ve never had any kind of adversity like that, and it snowballed on us. We’ve always turned the page, and we just didn’t tonight. Fortunately for us, we live to see another day tomorrow.”

It’s only second time in the last three seasons that Warren Central (20-7) has been run-ruled, and it put it on the brink of elimination. WC will need to win Game 2 Friday night at 7 p.m. at Northwest Rankin (21-8) to keep its season alive.

Warren Central’s first six losses this season were by a total of eight runs.

Northwest Rankin has won 10 games in a row.

“We were just looking past Northwest, thinking we’re going to have the game given to us. I guess we weren’t really worried about it, thinking we’re just going to have a breeze,” said WC pitcher Taft Nesmith, who struck out four and walked two in 4 1/3 innings. Nesmith gave up nine runs, only three of which were earned.

Right from the start, things seemed to be going against the Vikings.

With two outs in the bottom of the first inning, Tyler Vroman drove a single to right field.

Landon Stewart tried to score from second, but was cut down with a perfect throw from Northwest Rankin’s Blake Morris to keep the game scoreless.

The fourth inning, though, was when it really got sideways. Jackson Hailey reached on an error, and two batters later Morris popped a high fly ball to left that Stewart lost in the lights. Center fielder Conner Wilkinson hustled over to try to save it, but slightly overran the ball and it hit off his glove to allow the first run of the game to score.

The next batter, Kaleb McBeth, singled to center. Wilkinson charged the ball to try to keep Morris from scoring, and it bounced under his glove and rolled to the fence. McBeth circled the bases and scored easily to give the Cougars a 3-0 lead.

Another error led to three more unearned runs in the fifth inning, and Northwest scored six times in all to blow the game open. Cole Schurb’s RBI groundout in the sixth made it 10-0, and the game ended after the Vikings were retired without incident in the bottom half of the inning.

Schurb finished 2-for-4 with three RBIs for Northwest Rankin.

“We’re shocked,” Northwest Rankin coach Jeff McClaskey said of the final score. “We just needed a little bit of help to get going, and of course their defense helped us tonight. When they made a mistake, it seemed like we got lucky or got a big hit.

“It just snowballed on Warren Central. Of course we all know they’re a lot better than that. We made them look bad tonight, but they made themselves look bad on defense. It’s just a shame it got to that point, but this time of year we’ll take anything we can get.”

The only consolation in the misery for the Vikings was that it was clearly their worst game of the season. In the first 26 games they had committed a total of 32 errors, and this was only the third time they’ve allowed nine or more runs. That, players said, should make this an easy loss to shake off when they face elimination tonight.

“That was definitely not WC baseball,” Nesmith said. “We’re going to come back tomorrow and (win).”

About Ernest Bowker

Ernest Bowker is The Vicksburg Post's sports editor. He has been a member of The Vicksburg Post's sports staff since 1998, making him one of the longest-tenured reporters in the paper's 140-year history. The New Jersey native is a graduate of LSU. In his career, he has won more than 50 awards from the Mississippi Press Association and Associated Press for his coverage of local sports in Vicksburg.

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