PLYMOUTH – A win, is a win, and Plymouth’s Pilgrims used an outstanding pitching performance from Bailey Clark to ride to a 1-0 NLC victory at home over Goshen.
Clark – in his first start of the season – threw just 77 pitches and was behind only one hitter in tossing a five hit shut out masterpiece to keep the Pilgrims in the NLC race with two tough road games coming up this week at Concord and Wawasee.
“He did a fantastic job,” said Plymouth head coach Ryan Wolfe. “We have a lot of guys on our staff that are capable of this and some guys that in a situation like this they want the ball. I know Bailey felt comfortable out there. After last night’s outing he was high on confidence and we knew he was going to give us a good outing. We just wanted him to give us what we had and tonight that was seven innings of well pitched baseball.”
“He had everything working early in the count for strikes when you get ahead of guys you can keep them off balance and do a lot of different things.”
While Clark was outstanding, Goshen starter James Paetkau was nearly as good. Mixing his pitches and staying ahead he took a three hit shut out into the sixth when disaster struck in one error by his shortstop Mike Pinarski.
Justin Drudge got aboard on a throwing error with one out, stole second and scored on a single by Cam Eveland and that would be all that Clark would need.
“We weren’t able to tag him (Paetkau) for any big base hits,” said Wolfe. “We got some guys in scoring position by stealing bases and that’s how our team’s made up. Even when we aren’t hitting the ball we do some little things to score runs and we were able to take advantage of a big hit by Cam.”
Clark surrendered a final hit in the seventh to Phil Wertz but it was too little too late as he closed out the complete game when in quick fashion.
“Coming into this game we’d been hitting well,” said Wolfe. “That’s really what we had to do early in the year was manufacture some runs and do some things but we have six or seven guys in our lineup that can get down the line. Those are athletic guys out there doing what I ask them to do.”
Plymouth is now 10-9 on the year 6-4 in NLC play and play a pair of road games to end the week at Concord tonight and Wawasee on Friday.
Linescore
Goshen 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-5-1
Plymouth 0 0 0 0 0 1 x 1-4-0
WP – Clark. LP – Paetkau. 2B – Nixon (P).
