In nail-biter fashion, Park fended off Orono in the seventh inning. After an early comeback from being down 2-0, the Orioles led 5-2. Their lead didn’t last as a few walks caused a 5-5 tie game. In the bottom of the 6th, Park scored a run, taking a one-point lead and securing the home win. This was Park’s third win of the year.
Head coach Brian Kelly said he liked the back-and-forth play today, and it’s important and hopeful they finally came out on the other side.
“It was a real battle today, so it was cool to see. They punch first, then we punch back, they punched back and then we were able to get one at the end and kill them out,” Kelly said. “Coming into this game, we’ve already had two one-run losses so it felt really good to stick this one out and get the win.”
Senior Cole Denham said it’s nice to win a battle and that’s what’s needed against good teams especially when you’re down early.
“The game went well; it was a kind of a game where we had to fight to win,” Denham said. “They came back in that sixth inning, but we fought all the way to the end, and that’s how you have to get wins in these tough matchups.”
Junior Grant Haggerty said even after a weak start, they were able to compete back in the end. He said what helped them is their unique pitching and batting practice.
“We started out pretty slow, but we got the bats going at the end and battled to come back from behind,” Haggerty said. “We’ve been working on a lot of batting practice and we’ve been facing some higher velocities and we got to face that today and put ourselves to the test.”
Denham said there’s nitpicky defensive stuff they could fix, yet they figured out their pitching problem for today’s game by fixing walks.
“There’s just some little defensive things that we could pick up a little bit, but we played a pretty clean game out there,” Denham said. “We’ve talked all year about pitchers getting their walks down and we did a really good job of that for most of the game today.”
Haggerty said they could have been more aggressive at the plate, but they really hung on in every at-bat they could.
“We were not necessarily hunting the fastballs which I believe hurt us,” Haggerty said. “We did a really good job of getting back when behind in counts and battling while at two strikes and that’s always a challenging thing to work through.”
Denham said their high pressure caused them to work through three pitchers, which means their offense is rolling.
“Our offense was really good in this game,” Denham said. “We went through three pitchers, which is always good, and we had nine hits so we put the pressure on.”
Kelly said they’re trying to stay in the moment by not looking too far in the future, as their competition and focus is right in front of them.
“We’re honestly not trying to look far forward, I mean just this week we’re facing some extremely hard competition,” Kelly said. “All of the games are tough but with Wayzata, Chan and Armstrong ahead of us we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves.”
Park’s next game is at Chanhassen at 6:00 p.m. May 1 at Chanhassen High School.
