Boyertown pounds Plymouth

ROYERSFORD – His team had just suffered baseball’s equivalent of a TKO in its Pennsylvania State Legion Tournament opener, but Plymouth coach T.J. Carlin had no worries.

“It’s not gonna faze them,” Carlin said of his players. “They have nothing upstairs. The whole team, there’s nothing upstairs. They’ll be playing cards tomorrow morning in the dugout like they were tonight before the game.”

After falling 11-1 to perennial Legion power Boyertown in seven innings Tuesday night, Plymouth will have to battle through the loser’s bracket if it hopes to earn one of two bids to the national regionals. First up is a 9:45 a.m. elimination game today with Region 6 champ West Allegheny.

This group was in a similar spot just one week ago. Plymouth dropped its Region 5 opener to Berwick, then roared back with five straight wins to earn this trip to states.

“Let’s hope everything plays out the way it did at regionals,” Carlin said.

It was two bad innings, the second and the sixth, that doomed Carlin’s team on Tuesday.

Mike Schwager drew a bases-loaded walk in the second to make it 1-0. The Bears (44-6) then got a Brandon Sullivan sacrifice fly and a two-out, two-run double from Steve Bealer to go ahead 4-0.

But Plymouth ace Casey Mulligan got into somewhat of a groove from there. He retired 10 of the next 11 hitters he faced, with a Schwager fourth-inning walk serving as the only blemish.

Meanwhile, Plymouth (27-7) got an unearned run off quick-working Garret Crable (9-2) in the fourth to keep it close. Plymouth had a chance to get closer in the sixth, when it loaded the bases with no outs, but Crable got a strikeout and a double play to escape.

Crable gave up five hits and a walk in five innings. His quick delivery seemed to rattle Plymouth, especially in the early going.

“I knew (the quick delivery) was coming,” Carlin said, “but they just weren’t geared for it. We still had our chances. We loaded the bases with nobody out. If we push somebody across, it’s a different game at that point.”

Plymouth tried with little success to step out of the box between pitches. The strategy seemed to fluster Plymouth’s hitters more than it did Crable.

“Any smart team will try to do that to me, try to slow my rhythm down,” Crable said. “But it seemed like, especially early, the more they tried to mess my rhythm up by stepping out, they were messing themselves up and making themselves less ready to hit.”

Mulligan hit the 100-pitch mark early in the bottom of the sixth, when Boyertown came up with five runs to pull away. Schwager got things going with a two-run single that chased Mulligan.

“Eighty pitches is a lot to ask in this heat,” Carlin said. “It was time to pull him out and maybe save him for later this week.”

Reliever Chris Pollick served up a two-run triple to Brent Ruminski, who scored on a Bealer single. With one out and the bases loaded in the seventh, Schwager came up with a two-run single to left that triggered the 10-run mercy rule.