PM Baseball Team Ends Season with 5-15 Mark
The Parry McCluer High School baseball team knew heading into the quarterfinals of the Region 1C baseball tournament that it would take a near-perfect game to advance past top-seeded Auburn. Needless to say, it was an ill-opportune time for the Fighting Blues to turn in a subpar defensive outing.
PM (5-15) committed nine errors in the game, and Auburn (20-1) tallied 12 unearned runs to blank the Blues, 14-0, in the opening round of the tournament Thursday afternoon in Riner.
“A lot of people would call Auburn the best team in the state,” said PM head coach Bryan Loy. “We had to play our best game. We make more plays, and [maybe] it’s a much closer ball game.”
The Eagles took control of the game early, scoring a pair of unearned runs in the home half of the first inning. The Blues had two errors in the frame, both of them with two outs.
“I thought [Braedyn] Houck pitched really well,” lamented Loy, completing his eighth year as PM’s head coach. “He got the ground balls and the pop-ups in tough situations. We just didn’t make the plays behind him.”
Though he walked five batters and hit another in his 3.1 innings of work, Houck allowed only two earned runs to suffer the loss. Brayden Holdren recorded the final two outs on the mound for the Blues.
Two Auburn hurlers conspired to toss the shutout for the Eagles. Matthew Altizer threw the first four, allowing just one hit while striking out nine, and Cody Flinchum closed it out, giving up one hit with a pair of strikeouts.
Offensively, the Blues didn’t muster a hit until the top of the third, when Kyler Ramsey singled. At that point, the Eagles led 4-0, and the Auburn lead had grown to 14-0 by the time Houck came up with PM’s other hit, a two-out double in the fifth inning.
The young PM team finished 3-6 in the Pioneer District, earning wins over Craig County, Eastern Montgomery and Highland County. In the district tournament, the fifth-seeded Blues won at fourth-seeded Eastern Montgomery 11-9 in the quarterfinals before falling 8-1 in the semifinals at top-seeded Narrows, which went on to win the district title. The Blues then lost 6-5 in the third-place game at third-seeded Bath County.
Reviewing the season, Loy said, “The way the season ended was kind of the story of the whole season. We made plays here and there, and if we made more, the record is probably a lot different. I do think, however, there was a lot of improvement and growth from game one.”
The Blues will miss their four seniors: Houck, Holdren, Peyton Ramsey and Brylen Wade.
