By David Shaw
dshaw@salisburypost.com
North Rowan offered little resistance in Saturday afternoon’s consolation-round loss to Forbush.
The Cavs went down quietly, 11-0 in five innings, and will spend Easter with a 1-11 overall record.
“Offensively, we couldn’t get a whole lot going,” losing coach Rob Linder said after North managed only a pair of second-inning singles. “And defensively there were some balls that dropped in. Maybe if we had taken better angles to the ball we could have made those plays.”
Forbush (8-4), which suffered an 11-0 loss to East Rowan in a first-round game yesterday, quickly turned things around against the Cavs. It battered losing pitcher Matt Laurens for nine runs in 11/3 innings and scored all of its runs in the first two frames.
“He was throwing his pitches, mainly fastballs on the outside part of the plate,” said North catcher Wesley Barker. “They were just a really good-hitting team.”
Linder felt Laurens ó a left-handed sophomore ó may have had a control problem.
“It was too good,” he said. “He got too much of the plate. I’ve seen him pitch a lot better.”
Forbush jumped on Laurens for a pair of run in the bottom of the first, then sent 13 men to the plate and scored nine more on nine hits in the second.
“There wasn’t anything we could do,” said NR first-baseman Travis Honeycutt. “They were just hitting the gaps with everything.”
A key blow came early in the second. Following a leadoff double by Ryan Doss, Justin Williams crunched a first-pitch fastball over the fence in left-center for a two-run homer.
“That’s Justin’s second one this week,” said FHS coach Jerome Cannon. “He’s a dead-red fastball hitter and he got one he could swing at. He hasn’t walked all season. He goes up there hacking and sometimes it just hits him in the bat.”
Winning pitcher Jarret Mullins allowed only back-to-back singles to North’s Patrick Snider and Honeycutt. Only three Cavs reached base during his four-inning stint, and two of those were erased on double plays.
“Give them credit,” Linder concluded. “They hit the ball pretty hard and didn’t give us much of a chance.”