Perry baseball finishes funky week with win over Thomas County Central

PERRY — The Perry Panthers (2-4) have had a weird week of baseball, but they finished off strong with a 15-12 win over the Thomas County Central Yellow Jackets (4-4) on Friday.

Three observations:

A funky few days

It has been an odd few days for Perry baseball, but they came out of an irregular week 2-1.

Their first win was a 4-3 walk-off against Veterans, which was close because of two dropped third strikes in the top of the seventh.

On Thursday they lost 18-11 in an error-filled shootout to the Warhawks that was anybody’s game until the sixth inning.

Then, in the final game of the week, they buckled down in the fourth inning to prevent another marathon and take care of the Yellow Jackets.

It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not in a stretch with so many ups and downs. The offense benefitted from a lot of errors, and the defense had some uncharacteristic mistakes. It’s all part of the early-goings of a team trying to find their identity, according to Panthers coach Denny Bryant.

“We’re really trying to find our identity. You had a close 4-3 game walk-off on Wednesday, and then yesterday, which I don’t even want to talk about yesterday,” Bryant said. “Today against a really good team, didn’t play perfect, but we competed. We didn’t let things unravel like we did yesterday.”

“We’re really just trying to find out what is our identity? Are we gonna be a team that’s going to fight and scrap? Tonight those guys, they fought. They fought to the last out, so I was proud of that.”

Buckling down defensively to close out the game

The strangest part of the last two games in particular for the Panthers was the amount errors committed by both teams.

That’s what made Thursday night’s game last nearly four hours. The amount of walks and errors kept the game going, and it looked like Friday’s contest might be more of the same.

And it was, until the fourth inning. Both teams scored nine runs each in the second and third innings combined, and it took nearly two hours just to get through those two into the fourth.

But something just clicked as the Panthers entered the top of the fourth inning, and they took care of the first three batters they saw to hold Thomas County Central scoreless for the first time.

The defense still has a ways to go, especially when it comes to figuring out who’s going to play where, but Perry seemed to get back in the swing of things in the last leg of Friday’s game.

“One, it starts with just pitchers throwing strikes. If pitchers can be consistent and consistently throw strikes, the defense anticipates the ball to come,” Bryant said. “When you got a pitcher that throws a lot of balls, they get flat-footed sometimes.”

“We made some defensive changes today. We moved Jackson Thompson to third base, and then Brady Preston who’s been catching, we moved him to first base,” Bryant continued. “And I tell you what, it really made Brady Preston relax because he had some really big hits for us today. So getting him out from behind the plate and getting him to first base, I think gave him some confidence which is going to help us offensively.”

Finding the producers

The Panthers put up 26 runs in their last two games (also gave up 30), so clearly something was working offensively.

In their tournament at Richmond Hill, they really struggled to get the bats going and saw some of those problems leak into the first game against Veterans.

But over the last two days they’ve found something that’s worked, even if they’ve been aided by errors.

“I think offensively we’re starting to find our way. We’re starting to find out guys who can produce for us and really figuring out what our lineup is going to be,” Bryant said. “I’ve been pleased with even yesterday and even on Wednesday with our offensive production. We’re starting to put better at-bats together, so that’s exciting.”

“We just go to clean up the pitching. Clean up the walks, hit batters, passed balls and then play good defense and score runs. If we do that, we’re gonna be pretty good.”

UP NEXT

Perry will host Luella on Monday, March 3 at 6 p.m.