BY MIKE LONDON
SALISBURY POST

Davie County’s Andrew Daywalt says he’s a shortstop first, a hitter second, a baserunner third.

Way down there somewhere on his baseball priority list is pitching.

“Yeah, I throw it a little bit,” admits a sheepish Daywalt. “But I’m not much of a pitcher.”

West Rowan would beg to differ. Daywalt threw six solid innings against the Falcons on Saturday afternoon, leading Davie to a 6-2 semifinal win in the Cliff Peeler Baseball Classic and a berth opposite 4A Central Piedmont Conference rival South Rowan in Monday’s 7 p.m. finals.

West (12-7) will play East Rowan (10-7) at 4 p.m. for third place.

“Davie played very well,” said West coach Chris Cauble. “They gave a near flawless performance.”

The game was closer than the score. Both teams had seven hits and West bopped the lone homer. But it was Davie (15-3) that delivered the clutch hits and fired the pressure pitches. And it was Davie that made the key defensive plays.

And most of those huge plays were turned in by that kid who says he’s not a pitcher.

“Daywalt will tell you he’s not one,” said Herndon. “But he loves getting on that mound. He loves it, because more than anything else, he’s a competitor.”

What Daywalt really is — in a word — is a player.

“He can do it all,” said Herndon, who can talk all day and all night about Daywalt’s walk-off homer that won the CPC Tournament last year. “You hear about five-star guys, he’s a five-star guy. He hits it, throws it, catches it and runs the bases. When he pitches, there’s no courtesy runner. We tell him he has to be tough as nails.”

Daywalt’s Saturday boxscore won’t tell the full story. It’s not what he does — even though he’s hitting .500 — as much as it’s when he does it.

He had only one hit against West, but it was a laser beam on a 1-and-2 offering by West’s ace Jared Barnette that broke open a tense game. When Daywalt was on the mound, West hit many balls hard, but when it mattered — really, really mattered —the Falcons couldn’t get to him.

There was a game within a game going on between the team’s stars — Barnette and Daywalt. They went at it.

And it was all Barnette for the first three innings. Barnette nailed Daywalt with a pitch his first time up and whiffed him on his second trip. Then Barnette cranked a two-run homer to right off the Davie junior when Daywalt grooved him a fastball in the third. It was Barnette’s county-leading fourth homer.

But Daywalt had the last laughs.

Davie was clinging to a 3-2 lead and there were two outs and one on in a seemingly quiet bottom of the fourth when Falcon shortstop Clay Everson booted Ricky Bentley’s grounder. The next batter was Daywalt. With Barnette one strike from escaping the inning, Daywalt lashed a rope into the left-field corner to plate Josh Golding. When Matt Morgan couldn’t come up with the ball cleanly, Bentley sped around the bases to give Davie a 5-2 lead. Dave Poplin followed with a hit and it was 6-2.

“We gave them three runs there,” said Cauble. “After it was 6-2, it’s just hard to get four back against a good club.”

But West threatened to do just that in the fifth. That’s when Daywalt came up big again.

With one out, Morgan doubled and Shawn Trosper singled, bringing to the plate Barnette and Ben Hampton, West’s two big guns. Barnette lined one toward the right side, but second baseman Matt Dalton gloved the ball at his knees for the second out.

Lefty-hitting Hampton, author of a legendary scoreboard-clearing shot in the first round of the Peeler, stepped in next. Everyone assumed Daywalt would walk him with a base open. That seemed an especially good idea after Daywalt fell behind 3-and-1. But Daywalt got a called strike strike two, then dropped a perfect curveball on the black for the strikeout.

A disgusted Hampton knew it, laid the bat down and stared back at Daywalt with an amazed expression.

“Hampton’s a guy you have to make good pitches to,” said Daywalt. “You throw him something out over the plate and he rips it. I just made the pitch I wanted to right on the outside corner.”

“Did you see that pitch to Hampton?” marveled Davie assistant Mike Lovelance, who coaches Daywalt and the Mocksville Legion team in the summer.

Everyone saw it. And it wasn’t too bad a toss for a kid who’s not a pitcher.

“Daywalt gave us no opportunity to get back into it,” said Cauble. “And then they’ve got (Travis) Allen down there to finish it off.”

Daywalt jogged to short for the seventh and Allen turned the lights out on the Falcons with a 1-2-3 inning, which included two strikeouts.

Davie got contributions up and down the lineup.

“Just a team effort, a total team effort,” said Herndon.

Bentley, who usually plays second but had moved to short with Daywalt pitching, had a superb game afield. Catcher Jeffrey Jones made a tough block of a bouncing Daywalt curve to save a run with a man at third.

Chris Seaford, Jacob Garner and Matt Dalton, who, believe it or not, produced his very first hit of the year, drove in the runs that gave the War Eagles, 10th-ranked in 4A, the early lead.

“For some reason, all our guys were fired up to play this crowd (West),” said Herndon. “We watched them play for the first time Thursday. We hear about West a whole lot and we know they’re a good team and play in a good league (South Piedmont Conference) and all. But, maybe we’re not such a bad team, either.”

Especially when that shortstop is pitching.

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NOTES:Cauble was disappointed, but not frustrated. “You don’t like to lose, but better a loss now than one next Friday (when West plays a crucial SPC game against Sun Valley),” he said. ... The scoreboard incorrectly read 7-2 rather than 6-2 for several minutes. “We were trying to trick them,” laughed Herndon. ... Dalton trotted to first base after Barnette threw ball three to him in the second. “I told Matt, “In America, you get four balls,’ ” Herndon explained. “That cracked him up a little bit. Then they hollered that he wanted a walk and didn’t want to hit it.” That’s when Dalton went up and delivered his key hit. ... Davie won a tough 6-4 CPC game over South in Mocksville.