Baseball: Silver Creek rides late-game wave to take down Longmont
Apr. 30—LONGMONT — When a baseball team teeters on the edge of the bubble in the final weeks of the regular season, every passing game is fragile.
Silver Creek was just the bull in the china shop that Longmont had hoped to avoid on Tuesday afternoon. The Raptors, down two runs late, tapped into an eight-run surge in the sixth inning to vault themselves to an 11-5 victory over the Trojans.
The Raptors were already comfortably inside the 32-team regional cutoff in CHSAA's Selection & Seeding Index at No. 18. The Trojans, on the other hand, sat at No. 31 prior to the contest. That makes their upcoming challenge against Class 4A's top team that much more daunting — and more vital.
"I think we're going to have to win one of these games coming up against Windsor," Trojans junior left fielder Zayden Villela said. "It definitely affects us. We just got to take this game, clear it and be ready for the next one."
Silver Creek's senior pitcher, Jake Bator, ended his 5 1/3 innings on the mound with five strikeouts and just three earned runs allowed. Junior Noah Richardson, coming in to clean up, kept the Trojans scoreless through the last 1 2/3 frames. The Raptors ended their game with eight RBIs, including three from designated hitter Isaac Sandberg.
Villela, for the Trojans, accounted for two of the three RBIs they earned.
The two squads began the game fairly well-matched, as Silver Creek took the first swing at Longmont with three runs in the bottom of the first. Longmont's defense held firm throughout the next few frames, then tied the contest up at 3-3 with its own offensive flow in the top of the fourth.
The Trojans, showcasing their strengths in small bursts, claimed their first and only lead of the game in the top of the fifth. They scored two more, with an RBI single from Tyson Hagen and an RBI double from Villela, to take a 5-3 lead in the waning innings.
"I think when we're going, we're going. We're on a roll," Villela said. "We just need to pull everything together, all aspects of the game."
That didn't sit right with the Raptors. Not on their home field.
Silver Creek's Henry Pendergrass opened up the bottom of the sixth with a fly ball, reaching first on an error, then sprinted all the way to third base on the same miscue. Nolan Gaccetta scored, then opened up the floodgates for the Raptors.
Silver Creek sent another five runners across home plate before the Trojans managed to make the first out. The Raptors, still flying high, added two more runs before returning their bats to the dugout.
Longmont couldn't recover in the top of the seventh.
The Trojans fell to 9-10 in the loss and will now face off with the mighty Wizards of Windsor in their territory on Saturday morning. Silver Creek, now 12-5, will return home on Wednesday to face off with the same Windsor squad.
Bator said that the team's confidence is running high heading into the home stretch of the regular season, which ends in the middle of May, after defeating the likes of 4A's top two teams earlier in the year.
Defeating their rivals just added another feather in their cap.
"Taking down Windsor and Holy Family, it kind of showed us what we can do," Bator said. "I truly believe that we can make a deep playoff run. Guys have been stepping up and doing things we didn't expect them to do at the beginning of the season. It's awesome. We're playing as a cohesive nine. One guy is not better than the next guy. We all have our job to do and we all get it done."
