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After .500 start, Senators drop 5 of 6
Compared to where the team was at this time last year, the Haymarket Senators look great at 5-8.
That five-spot in the W column is almost half of the 11 wins Haymarket accumulated in the entire 2007 campaign when the Senators finished dead last with 32 losses and one tie.
But now, compared to the rest of the Valley Baseball League, the Senators have some work to do.
Haymarket started the season at .500 by winning at Fauquier on opening day 4-2 and making up for a three-game slide by taking out Staunton, Harrisonburg and Luray in succession.
The Senators, who play their home games at Battlefield High School, have fallen on tougher times since then with one win in their last six outings going into Wednesday. That skid culminated with a 10-6 home field loss to cellar-dwellers Woodstock (3-10) on Tuesday.
Three Haymarket errors coupled with 12 River Bandit hits made it tough for the squad, under the direction of rookie coach Bill Shields, to adjust, despite a fourth-inning long ball over the 340 sign in right field by Scott Krieger of George Mason University.
“Our defense has been terrible,” commented Shields. “The one game we beat against Front Royal, we were lights-out. Everything that was hit, we were gobbling up.”
The Senators have not won since that June 13 match up.
In the top of the ninth inning against Woodstock, a dropped fly-ball in the infield, a missed bare-handed grab on a bunt, an obstructing-the-base-runner call and a hit through the infield that went right between the first baseman’s legs contributed to the Senators allowing two unearned runs, which put the game out of reach.
In order for that to change, Shields said he wants his guys to learn from their mistakes and focus on some of the positive steps they have taken this season.
“It’s just like life,” said the coach from Massachusetts. “Failure is an experience. You’ve got to take the best of the failure experience. If you keep making the same mistake over and over, then that failure is going to come back and eat you up.”
Relief pitcher Dan White from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell provided one of the positives for Haymarket by mowing down the River Bandits one-two-three in the top of the seventh inning after Woodstock put up five runs in the fifth inning and two more in the sixth.
Tripp Swann of Samford University came in the next inning and kept his opposition off the board again while Haymarket closed the gap from 8-2 after six innings to 8-6 by the end of the eighth.
“We can put up four to six runs a game and there’s no business we should be losing, you know?” commented Shields. “So we did put up six tonight, but they put up 10. So, that’s just how it went.”
Krieger, one of the Senators’ newest additions, managed to knock in the one early run for Haymarket after Woodstock’s Brooks Robinson got a hold of an offering by Dean Wolosiansky and deposited it over the left-field wall.
The coach gave credit to Woodstock starting pitcher Brach Davis for limiting Haymarket to one run through the first five innings.
“We were trying to make adjustments on him, but it was a little bit too late,” said Sheilds.
Hometown hero David Herbek, a former infielder for Battlefield High and now playing college ball at James Madison University, said his team looked mostly for fastballs from Davis but received some well-placed off-speed pitches every so often.
“Any time you locate it, it’s tough to hit,” said the shortstop from Haymarket.
“They only won two or three games and they were looking for a win real bad,” said Shields of Woodstock.
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