Owls Plate 5 In The Sixth, Defeat Stone Memorial 11-6

by Rusty Ellis

CARTHAGE – The Smith County Owls used a five-run sixth inning to take down Stone Memorial 11-6 in a seesaw affair on Friday evening.

“We’ve been working on competing for an entire game, and we finally did that today,” said SCHS head coach Malone Smith. “We’ve lost some close ones in that time, and today, we finally gutted one out. We needed to win a game like this today.”

The Panthers struck first on an RBI single from Nick Osmun in the opening frame, just the beginning of a big game for the senior backstop, but Smith answered right back in the bottom of the second with a bases-loaded walk to knot things up at 1-1.

Gage Eldridge gave Stone the lead again on an RBI single in the top of third inning, but the Owls responded with a four-run bottom of the fourth to take control of the game.

Evan King tied the game back up at 2-2 with his RBI double, and after a Riley Martin sacrifice fly, an error and a Morgan Sinclair RBI single, the Owls held a 5-2 lead.

Osmun blasted a home run in the ensuing inning to cut the lead down to 5-3, but it was pushed back to 6-3 with a Sinclair sacrifice fly in the bottom of the fifth. Stone finally squared the game up with a three-run sixth inning, as the Panthers looked to have all the momentum heading into the bottom of the inning.

There however, Smith countered with a five-run inning powered by RBIs from Sinclair, Martin, Bennett Gammon and Kylan Johnson to take their largest lead of the game at 11-6, and Westen Vance closed the game out in the seventh from there to secure the Owl victory.

“You’ve got to play clean baseball when you’re playing a good team like that,” Smith said. “They’re putting the ball in play, you can’t give them free bags like that and throw the ball away like we did. It didn’t impact our demeanor, we just kept playing ball.”

Smith County now turns its attention to Jackson County on Monday, as Smith believes there’s still a lot of goals out ahead for his team to achieve.

“Keep doing what you’re doing, I think we lost who we were, but we’ve found it again,” Smith said. “I would like to win out, we’ve got some tough teams coming up. It’s going to be a good challenge for us coming up, especially going into the postseason.”