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THOMASVILLE— Buddy Allen’s tape-measure shot had nothing to do with the kinds of titanic blasts generally associated with aluminum bats.
Instead, his grand slam Friday night could be measured in inches — as in how close it came to being caught, and how it narrowly missed scraping the top of the short fence at East Davidson.
“It cleared by enough,” Golden Eagles head coach Dan Tricarico said after his squad’s surprisingly easy 10-0 win over North Rowan. “We talk to him about getting the ball out of the air, but he hit it good. It’s nice to see those things happen to kids that don’t normally do something like that.”
Allen’s slam propelled East Davidson to an unbeaten season in the 2A Central Carolina Conference and relegated the Cavaliers (10-2) to second place after not losing a CCC game the past two seasons.
East cruised to a 7-1 victory in the first meeting this year behind the pitching of senior Matt Bryant, who allowed just one hit in that game. On Friday, he escaped a first-inning jam helped along by errors and surrendered just three hits in the five-inning affair.
“They played really good and we didn’t,”North head coach Bill Kesler said. “That’s the way it’s been. Either we beat somebody pretty good or somebody beats us pretty good.”
The Cavs, coming off Thursday night’s 20-0 win against Lexington, tried to grab the momentum against the Golden Eagles. Aaron Rimer led off the game reaching on an error and Jimbo Davis singled before Bryant settled down and got three infield outs, including Jeremy Baer’s nice throw from third to cut down Rimer at the plate.
Baer opened the second inning with a single off Tad Ogg and Bryant followed with a walk. With one out, Dustin Gallimore dribbled a slow roller that the North infield didn’t react to fast enough, loading the bases.
Ogg got No. 9 hitter Jason Loflin to foul out before Allen sent the first pitch, an inside fastball, toward the left-field fence.
“I knew I had a shot at it,”Davis said. “I was playing toward the gap, so I had to jump at full speed and I over-ran it a little. I didn’t calculate it right, I guess.”
“I knew it was going to be close,”Kesler added. “But if we had made the plays we were supposed to (the infield grounder), we wouldn’t have had to throw him that pitch with the bases loaded.”
Bryant made short work of the deflated Cavs in the third inning, working his second straight 1-2-3 frame. He needed just 14 pitches and about two minutes to get out of the second and third innings.
“He’s got three good pitches, but it’s us being too hyped up, not being patient,”Davis said. “We swung at a lot of first pitches — pitcher’s pitches instead of hitters’ pitches.”
Bryant — who goes by middle initial “H” because East Davidson has two senior athletes named Matt Bryant — retired 10 straight at one point in the first-place showdown that was rained out Tuesday and Wednesday.
“The problem was, we’ve been sitting on this game since Tuesday,”Tricarico said. “I don’t think ‘H’ has slept since Monday night.”
East Davidson plated two runs in the fourth inning on Loflin’s beautiful suicide squeeze and Kent Ridge’s infield out.
Steven Johnston took the mound in the fifth inning and, after striking out the first man up, surrendered three straight liners to center field. Rick Lambeth’s shot to the wall scored two runs and chased Johnston, and reliever Brandon Doby gave up a run-scoring single to Gallimore and a ground ball past the drawn-in infield to Loflin to end the game by the 10-run lead rule.
“I was expecting a one-, two-run game,”Tricarico said. “North’s a good team. We’ll probably see them again in the conference tournament.”
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NOTES: East Davidson (16-4 overall) earned a bye for the first round of the tourney with its first unbeaten league season in school history. North (16-6) will play host to No. 6 seed High Point Central on Monday. The semifinals and finals will be played Tuesday and Wednesday at Lexington. … Davis, Rimer and Ogg had the only Cavalier hits, all singles.
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