Bell County falls to Jackets in home-opener

Published 3:08 pm Thursday, March 21, 2019

One day after falling to Corbin in their opening game, the Bell County Bobcats suffered another setback in their home-opener against the Williamsburg Yellow Jackets on Tuesday afternoon falling 10-6 in a highly contested game.

With the score tied in the sixth, a strong seventh inning by Corbin propelled the Redhounds past Bell County.

“We’ve got a very young team,” said Bell County coach Scott Chaney. “We use a lot of freshman and sophomores. We led most of the game, but they ended up coming back on us and taking a lead. I was proud of the way we fought back. We ended up tying the game at six apiece in the sixth inning, and (Williamsburg) just finished strong.

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“We’re trying to clean up our pitching a little bit. We get ourselves in some tight spots with walks and things like that. There are a few errors that we need to clean up too, and hopefully once we have all these things tightened up, we will be right where we want to be before it gets too deep into the season. We are just going to take it one game at a time and focus on making ourselves better.”

The Bobcats had nine walks through the first six innings, allowing the Redhounds to keep runners in scoring position early in the game. Hayden Clark started on the mound for the Bobcats, totaling one hit, five runs, three earned runs and four walks and no strikeouts on 66 pitches. Alex Mayes took over for Clark in the fourth inning, totaling four runs, zero earned runs, five walks, three strikeouts and three hits on 78 pitches.

The Bobcats brought in Jacob Smith to close the game. Smith totaled one hit, one run, zero earned runs, no walks and two strikeouts on 22 pitches.

Clark, Mayes and Ethan Brock all had two hits on the day. Clark had two RBI, Mayes had one. Antonio Zachery, Jaden Hensley and Smith all had one hit apiece.

Smith and JM Baker added one RBI apiece. Mayes and Smith had two runs apiece. Brock and Zachery added one run each.

Bell County was slated to play Leslie County last night at home. Williamsburg took on McCreary Central on the road.