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Cougars manage to slip past Berry
Amy Walters / Editor in Chief
Columbus — A victory doesn’t have to be pretty to count, just ask the Columbus State Cougars after some shaky defense from Berry College allowed the Cougars to get out with a 10-9 victory at Cougar field on Wednesday.
Despite committing four errors and walking four and hitting four batters, Columbus State improved to 5-3 overall thanks largely to some clutch hitting and excellent relief pitching from Blake Allen.
Things didn’t start off well for the Cougars as CSU starter Matt Bunn allowed four of the first five Viking batters to reach and failed to make it through the first inning after allowing four runs, three earned on two hits and a walk.
Third baseman Scott Sears also made the first of his three errors on the day to make the situation even worse.
But the Cougars would come storming back with three runs of their own in the bottom half of the inning. After the first three Cougars up reached, Chris Nunnally would finally get CSU on the board with a sacrifice fly to left field. Ben Sutter followed with a run scoring single to center. Josh Maner plated the final Cougar run of the inning with a single to center.
Nunnally’s third homerun of the season tied the score in the third inning. But, after Sears committed his second error of the game and some faulty pitching from reliever John Swanson, Berry would push across four runs in the fourth to take a 8-4 lead. Columbus State trimmed the lead in half when Brad Bouras smashed a rocket off the first baseman’s glove down the right field line for a two-run single that made it 8-6.
Bouras tied the game in the bottom of the sixth when he launched his fifth homerun since Saturday, this one a bomb to deep center that drove in Rodney Kennedy, who had reached on a single to tie the game at 8-8.
Again, CSU pitching surrendered the lead, this time on a solo homerun to left from Berry’s A.J. Gray in the the seventh to give the visitors a 9-8 lead.
Columbus State would take the lead for good in the bottom of the seventh when after Patrick Murphy had reached on a bunt single to third, CSU’s Jeremy Cook singled to left field that went under Berry’s John Vigna’s glove and rolled all the way to the wall scoring Murphy and allowing Cook to advance to third. Cook would score on a Kennedy groundout to short.
From there, Allen was determined that he was going to shut down the Vikings and he almost single-handedly did as he sat down the last six Viking batters he faced, five on strikeouts, to push his record to 2-0 on the season. The Gray homerun was the only hit and run he allowed in 5.2 innings of work. He didn’t walk anyone while striking out nine. Bouras, Maner and Sutter paced the Cougar attack with three hits apiece while Bouras drove in four runs. Nunnally contributed a pair of RBI’s for the Cougars.
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