Heartbreaker set the tone for Day 3
It has been a tough run through the annual Rapid City Fourth of July Firecracker tournament this week and Day 3 was perhaps the toughest.
In the first of two games, Post 334 jumped out to a big early lead on the Omaha entry, 3-0 in the first and 8-3 by the end of the third. Brandon Flippen drove in three runs, two of which came on his first Post 334 home run over the right field wall at Floyd Fitzgerald Stadium. Post 334 then scored another in the fifth to give starting pitcher Luke Hite a 9-3 lead going into the fifth.
But trouble followed as Post 334′s relief staff was ambushed by the Omaha bats: five runs yielded in the sixth to make it a 9-8 game, then four more runs in the top of the seventh. When a stunned Post 334 came back to the plate in the last of the seventh, it trailed 12-9.
Still there was fight and three straight singles by Kyle Waterman, Sammy Smith and Mike Latta loaded the bases. A sacrifice fly brought in one run to make it 12-10, but the opportunity to tie the contest ended with a strike out and a long fly out to center field.
A tough game to recover from, Post 334 attempted to do just that less than 30 minutes later when it took on one of the pre-tournament favorites, the Missoula Mavericks, but quickly fell behind 2-0 when starter Willie Heiser was tagged for a double and home run on the first two pitches he threw to start the game. Eventually, however, Heiser settled down and his teammates scored a run (in the last of the first on a Flippen RBI single). The score was actually 4-1 going into the sixth, but as it had been in Post 334′s games, the last two innings of each game were a death knell. Missoula scored six runs after two were out in the sixth on the way to an easy 10-1 win.
Posted: July 2nd, 2010