Abby Heat go 2-1 in Edgar tourney

The Abbotsford Heat’s 17u summer league team went 2-1 in their tournament at Edgar this past weekend, taking on West Bend, the host team in Edgar and an Edgar/Athens combination team. The combination of Edgar and Athens was first up on the docket for the Heat, the two teams colliding on Friday evening. The Heat would come away with a dominant victory, winning 14-3 and ending the game in five innings.

The old adage “good things will happen if you put the ball into play” certainly rang true in Abbotsford’s tournament opener. The Heat enjoyed a plethora of baserunners all evening, some of them due to hits and others courtesy of errors committed by the Edgar/Athens co-op.

Abbotsford would score in every inning, nothing perhaps encapsulating their offensive performance better than a sequence in the fourth inning. After taking a walk to get on board, Evan Reis easily stole second two pitches later. A fielder’s choice would advance him to third before he took advantage of a wild pitch to score. This combination of aggressive running, batted balls and exploiting opposing errors would prove to be a winning combination.

The Heat had gotten the scoring started early. Leadoff batter JV Castillo’s walk in the first led to him stealing second ahead of Payton Schreiber’s single. This would drive in Castillo for the first run of the game and the Heat took an early 1-0 lead.

They expanded that lead to 4-0 in the second, two runs scoring on errors and Evan Reis driving in the third on a single to the outfield.

The Edgar/Athens combination got back into the game in the bottom half of the inning. Schreiber was patrolling the mound for Abbotsford and had cruised through the top of the opposing lineup in the first inning. However, the Heat ran into some trouble in his second inning of work as the Wildcat/Bluejay co-op started to make some solid connections with the baseball. A single up the middle with runners on second and third and two outs would score one and an error with bases loaded two batters later would drive in a second. The next batter would take a free pass after getting hit with a pitch, making the score 4-3. Schreiber would settle down and get the final out of the inning with the lead still intact.

After the second inning scare, the Heat would dominate the rest of the game, both offensively and defensively.

Nano Lopez got the scoring started in the third, driving in a run on his RBI single. He came around to score on an error by the opposing co-op’s shortstop. AJ Brodhagen scored a third run on a throwing error, reestablishing the Heat’s previous four run lead.

After adding two more runs in the fourth, a five-run fifth would put the Heat up by double digits. Blake Bargender drove in two runs with a double in the fifth and Reis added two more RBIs on a ground ball single between first and second. Jaxon Polivka drove in the fifth run on a fielder’s choice.

The game ended after Schreiber and the defense held the opposing co-op scoreless in the bottom of the fifth, leaving the Heat up by more than 10 runs after the inning.

Schreiber pitched all five innings for Abbotsford, shutting out the Edgar/ Athens co-op over the next three innings. The defense, after some struggles in the second, backed up their pitcher, their play highlighted by a perfectly executed 6-4-3 double play to end the third.

The Heat would play two more games on Saturday. They fell to host Edgar by a score of 9-0. The team still managed to make solid contact, but unlike the night before, these hits failed to find holes in Edgar’s defense, nor did Edgar give up many free passes. Abbotsford bounced back against West Bend, defeating them 6-2. The victory was highlighted by a home run courtesy of Reis, his second of the week.

The Heat finish up their summer season this Thursday in Loyal.