ONONDAGA COUNTY – Everything for the Baldwinsville softball team was going well right up to the moment it defeated Liverpool April 27 in the first encounter between the two since last spring’s Section III Class AA final.
What followed, a day later, was a defeat to Rome Free Academy that began a skid which spread through a first weekend of May where it lost three times in a 24-hour span to Camden, Maine-Endwell and Saratoga Springs.
And it continued last Monday in Camillus, when B’ville saw a slow start against West Genesee turn into a 3-1 defeat to the fast-rising Wildcats.
Bella Hotchkiss singled home Jenna Martin in the top of the first inning, only to have WG get three runs off Hotchkiss in the bottom of the first, the big blow Lexi Rydelek’s two-run home run.
From there, Hotchkiss blanked the Wildcats, ultimately striking out six against five hits allowed. Howeer, B’ville got nothing more against WG pitcher Maria Brandt, who overcame six hits (two of them by Martin) and got strong defense behind her.
This brought some urgency to B’ville’s game against Cicero-North Syracuse a day later at the Gillette Road Complex. Once again, though, the Bees were kept quiet at the plate in a 3-0 loss to the Northstars.
Avenging an 8-3 defeat to B’ville on April 20, C-NS struck for a pair of first-inning runs, tacked on an insurance run in the sixth and saw pitcher Lillian Hotaling earn a complete-game shutout, giving up just two hits and getting strong defense behind her.
Back home Thursday to face Fayetteville-Manlius, the Bees finally broke the skid, though it took nine long innings to put away the Hornets 11-10.
All looked fine when B’ville, with three different three-run rallies, led 9-4 through five. But F-M struck for five runs in the top of the sixth inning to erase that deficit, then put across a run in the top of the seventh.
Three outs from defeat, the Bees, down 10-9, stayed alive by scoring once in the bottom of the seventh and, after a scoreless eighth inning, put across the winning run in the ninth, having accumulated 18 hits to get there.
Even bigger, from the Bees’ standpoint, was the way it dominated Saturday’s rematch with RFA, blanking the Black Knights by a 9-0 margin.
A two-run first inning got B’ville in control, and it batted around in the second, plating six runs as it took full advantage of RFA’s five errors and got strong pitching from Hotchkiss, who held the Black Knights to two hits.
This final week of the regular season includes Tuesday’s trip to Liverpool, which falls in between battles with Auburn on Monday and West Genesee on Thursday afternoon.
