Northside baseball trounces Sumter County in spring break doubleheader

WARNER ROBINS — The Northside Eagles (6-16) started their second win streak of the season in a doubleheader sweep of the Sumter County Panthers (4-15) to snap a five-game losing streak and get ready for their last leg of region play.

They won Game 1 18-3 in three innings, and Game 2 15-0 in four.

Three observations from Tuesday’s non-region contest:

Staying away from “selfish swings”

Sumter County’s pitchers didn’t have a lot of command over their pitches, and there wasn’t a whole lot in the strike zone worth going after for the Eagles.

Northside also went up by double digit runs in the first two innings of each game; It would’ve been easy to swing for the fences like many do with little to no consequences.

However, coach Joey Walker stood at third base and coached his team on their approach at the plate, using the phrase “selfish swings” in reference to those big swings (and misses) as each batter attempted to be patient.

“We’re trying to establish a standard here, and one of those standards is that we’re not trying to overswing. We’re trying to pass the baton to the next guy,” Walker said. “Scripture is really big on doing your job and staying steady and just doing what’s expected of you and trusting the guy behind you.”

Although the Panthers did drop a few fly balls, Walker wanted his team to focus on getting on base and doing damage from there. They did well moving runners without putting the ball in play, and while some of that was from errors and poor fielding by Sumter County, the patient approach is what allowed Northside to pull away in both games.

“You can’t hit a five-run home run, so if we can get a single take it. Let the next guy hit a single. Somebody might come up, hit a double and we score two runs,” Walker said. “We’re trying to score two runs an inning. Sometimes that works out for us, sometimes it don’t. But when we talk about selfish swings, we’re talking about guys who are just taking these massive hacks for their stats instead of just passing it to the next guy.”

Stealing bases

The Eagles have some speed on the roster, particularly with Emerson Rugama and Elijah Rozier at the top of the lineup, and they’ve been trying to take advantage of that in recent weeks.

Northside had 15 total stolen bases on Tuesday, though some of those were because of bad throws across the infield.

Regardless it put more runners in scoring position; Some of those stole home as wild pitches came across the plate.

Time will tell whether or not this is something the Eagles can do consistently against better competition now and in the future.

“That’s been a big emphasis of ours for the last two weeks. We’ve been preaching it really , really hard. We had a whole practice where all we did was stations working on small ball stuff because we haven’t hit the ball to the wall very often,” Walker said. “So we told our guys if they would buy into that mindset of, we can pass it to the next guy, let’s move the runners, let’s try to catch the defense off guard and get them frustrated.”

“They’ve been buying in and they’ve worked really hard at it, and it’s worked really good for us,” Walker added. “We played really well last week against Veterans. We had a couple of close games that defensively [we] let it get away from us. Tonight we were able to see it come to fruition a little bit.”

Army of arms had their moments

Northside threw five pitchers out on the mound throughout the doubleheader, and some had some pretty solid results.

The most notable performances, while not lighting up the stat sheet in their short time, were from Jehibar Vivas, Taylor Hall and Kyle Baker.

Vivas went for two innings to start Game 1, saw eight batters, struck out four and walked one. His command was iffy at times, but he had some nasty outside curveballs to strike out a couple of batters.

Hall and Baker pitched a pair a piece in Game 2 with two and three strikeouts respectively. They also had their moments locating pitches and coaxing swings out of batters.

They don’t have high velocity or big breaking ball guys on the mound, but they have put together some solid outings recently even outside of this doubleheader.

“Our guys know we’re not a big strikeout club. We’re not pumping it in there [at 90 miles per hour],” Walker said. “So we preach in the zone and being able to mix our pitches up, like Vivas was able to do there. He’s a freshman, we’re excited about him. But just being able to keep guys off balance and if they do put it in play, trusting the defense to make plays behind them.”

UP NEXT

Northside will get back on the region road for the last series of the season on Tuesday, April 8 against Thomas County Central at 4:30 p.m. on Dyson Field.