[5/5/04]WINNSBORO, La. Gerald Mims hurt the Franklin Cougars with his bat, wounded them with his legs, and ripped their hearts out with his arm.

Mims drove in two runs with a single, beat a throw to the plate with a headfirst slide for an insurance run, then threw out Franklin’s Tyler Harris at the plate to end the Cougars’ final threat Tuesday night as Porters Chapel won Game 1 of the Academy-A South State championship series, 6-4.

Josh Gain was 2-for-3 with an RBI triple for PCA, and Chip Lofton added two hits. Blaise Sims went 3-for-4 with a double and an RBI, and Drew Wiggers was 2-for-3 with a home run for Franklin (28-6), which has taken half its losses this season to PCA and fell to the Eagles for the ninth straight time.

PCA (26-1) can wrap up the best-of-three series and advance to the Academy-A finals for the third time in four years by beating Franklin in Game 2 Friday at PCA at 5 p.m. Game 3, if necessary, will follow.

“Any time you can go on the road and get a one-game lead, it’s a big win,” PCA coach Randy Wright said. “(Franklin) never gave up. They fought all night. They could have laid down when they got behind 4-0, and they didn’t. They battled, they played hard, they took us to the wire, and it was just an exciting high school baseball game.”

Franklin has had chances to win nearly every encounter with PCA over the last three years, and Tuesday night’s game was no exception.

Trailing 6-2 entering the bottom of the fifth, Franklin started the inning with three straight singles. The last, an RBI bunt single by Sims, made it 6-3.

Harris followed with another bunt between the pitcher’s mound and third base, nearly the same spot as Sims’ hit. PCA third baseman Humphrey Barlow fielded it, but threw the ball past first baseman Justin Boler. The error allowed another run to score, cutting PCA’s lead to 6-4, and put runners at second and third with no outs.

On the next play, Sims was caught halfway between third and home on a botched safety squeeze and tagged out after a brief rundown.

“It was a safety bunt. He wasn’t supposed to break until he sees the ball down, and he just got hung up in no-man’s land,” Franklin coach Ryan Ellington said.

Matt Doyle then hit a fly ball to shallow left-center that was caught by Mims. Harris tagged and raced home, but Mims’ throw beat him by two steps. PCA catcher Rob Quimby caught the throw and tagged Harris for the final out as he juked to the left in a futile attempt to score.

“I just caught it and let it go,” Mims said. “They had been trying to do small ball on us all inning. Then they hit a pop up out there, and I knew we couldn’t let them score another run.”

The rally was Franklin’s last gasp. PCA pitcher Ryan Hoben shut the Cougars down over the final two innings, retiring six of the seven batters he faced in that span.

Hoben (9-1) struck out nine, walked one, and allowed eight hits in the game.

In addition to the fifth inning miscues, Franklin left two runners at third earlier in the game and committed two errors that led to four PCA runs.

“We played a good ballgame. It was just a couple of mental errors that we had that lost it. And that’s baseball,” Ellington said.

Although Mims’ throw from center put the dagger in Franklin, he did plenty of damage earlier in the game, too.

After PCA took a 2-0 lead in the top of the first on an RBI groundout by Barlow and an RBI triple by Josh Gain, Mims delivered a two-out, two-run single to make it 4-0.

Franklin’s Drew Wiggers cut it to 4-2 with a two-run homer in the bottom of the inning. The line drive to left shattered the side window of a van parked just beyond the fence.

“I got a little keepsake from there,” Wiggers said with a smile.

In the fifth, the Eagles tacked on two more runs to take a 6-2 lead.

“They won the game on the scoreboard, but I think we won the game everywhere else,” Ellington said. “… They just won the first battle. We’ve still got two more battles.”