Blackwood Falls to Haddon Heights

HADDON HEIGHTS—A slow start and numerous errors in the field were demise on Wednesday night as the team dropped its first game of the District 14 Little League Tournament, 14-6, to Haddon Heights.

Haddon Heights, which was designated as the away team in the game despite playing on its home field, started things up with a six-run first inning. Most of these runs resulted from six walks by Blackwood starter Brian Periera during his 2/3 inning of work.

“The kids got out of the game real fast,” said Blackwood head coach Anthony Polidoro.

The six runs in the first inning put Blackwood (1-1) in an early hole, and the team could not recover. Despite getting a solo home run from and an RBI single from Michael Gladis in the bottom half of the first inning to make the score 6-2, the team just couldn't carry any momentum offensively and defensively.

Blackwood's errors became more and more numerous as the game advanced. They were able to stay within four runs of Haddon Heights until the fifth inning, when three errors and three passed balls helped Heights to a five-run inning that made the score 12-4.

“They were pretty prevalent today,” Polidoro said about the errors his team made in the field. “Not catching the ball, throwing the ball around—that's stuff we go over in practice day in and day out and it just seems like we get nervous.”

The large backstop at the field helped Haddon Heights as they took every opportunity to move up bases on passed balls and wild pitches. They managed only seven hits in the game, but were able to score most of their runs off of Blackwood's fielding miscues.

“We believe strongly in running the bases hard here,” said Haddon Heights manager Kevin Spaeth. “Running hard from first to third, running from second to home and stealing bases. There's no jogging in baseball.”

Offensively, Blackwood couldn't duplicate the success they had on Monday at Mount Ephraim. Haddon Heights starting pitcher Matt Kennedy proved to have solid command and kept the Blackwood lineup off balance with his curveball. He struck out eight hitters in 4 2/3 innings. Five of those hitters struck out looking.

“What we preach here is get that first-pitch strike and get ahead of the hitters,” Spaeth said. “We knew that they had a lot of good fastball hitters and our goal was to keep them off guard and get ahead of them.”

Haddon Heights now advances to the next round, where they will face Audubon. For Blackwood, they head to the losers bracket, where they will have to win six straight games to win the district title. The challenge isn't fazing Polidoro, however.

“I think we can go through the losers bracket,” Polidoro said. “If they play their game, we'll go through that and just hope for the best.”

Blackwood's next game will be against the winner of tonight's game between Cramer Hill and Runnemede. They will play on Tuesday, with the location and time to be determined.

                    1  2  3  4  5  6     R  H  E
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H. Heights    6  1  1  0  4  2     14  7  2
Blackwood   2  0  2  0  2  0       6  6  4
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W: Matt Kennedy

L: Brian Periera

2B: Heights: Kennedy

HR: Blackwood: Joe Sannino