Tigers win season opener 16-3 against the Lakers

Saturday, March 26, 2022

After a 24 hour postponement due to weather in Southwest Missouri, the Tigers make the travel to the Lake of the Ozarks area worth it as they win the season opener against the Camdenton Lakers 16-3. “This was a great way for us to start the season,” said Head Coach for the Nevada Tiger Varsity baseball team Danny Penn. “The first inning I think we benefited from a lack of control with a lot of walks and missed balls that we took advantage of. We didn’t do a great job of putting the ball in play the first couple of innings, but when we finally settled down and made some adjustments we did a nice job of spreading the ball around.”

One surprise of the day that nobody expected, is that the junior baseball superstar Case Sanderson didn’t help score the 16 runs the Tigers scored against the Lakers. “I imagine when College teams scout us and see the results today,” said Penn, “they are going to think he scored a lot of those. Everyone else on the line up today did what they needed to do and we were able to work without him. Obviously he did a great job on the mound in this game especially in the first four innings when he did what we needed him to do.”

Sanderson struck out six players in yesterday's matchup against the Lakers and only gave up one hit which ended up being a triple for the Lakers in the second inning. Penn said on Sanderson's initial start to the season, “I thought he did a really nice job. In terms of his velocity he wasn’t on top of that regard in the beginning of the season, but you expect that. I thought they did a really nice job of looking on both sides of the plate. There were a number of batters who looked at the inside strikezone but they were not ready for it, and got into their heads a little bit. When a pitcher gets inside a batter's head it's always game over, especially when you can control the zone like Case. The one base hit the Lakers got was he was able to strand without damage and just rolled through his four innings that he pitched.”

While it was a dominating win for the Tigers in Camdenton, Mo., with the final score being 16-3, the game wasn’t perfect whatsoever. The final inning of play at the bottom of the fifth, there were numerous errors on the Tigers with dropping fly balls. Penn quoted, “Whether it's a deal where we lose focus just because we are up so much or just a situation of not practicing fly balls due to the fact the weather has been so bad that we can only practice inside, those are things every single person on this team can do. We all know how to catch pop ups because we have done it hundreds of times. I think out there it was more mental mistakes like not knowing the wind conditions, not knowing what the ball will do when it hits the infield when its going down. These are things I think if you were to ask them, they will tell you the correct answers on how to do it, but they simply just didn’t do it. This is a teachable moment that we can fix before the next game.”

But all in all, Coach Penn is proud of the way they played today, with a dominating win over the Camdenton Lakers. “We feel really good about this game today. I’ll be honest by saying that I didn’t think we would be able to play today with all of this weather that we have had recently, but not only did we get a chance to play, we got a chance to play well and to get a win this early in the season, we started the way we wanted too.” The scheduled home open on Saturday at noon against the Frontenac Raiders from Frontenac, Kan., has now been pushed back til Monday, March 28th in the afternoon at 4:30 p.m.

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