WEEKI WACHEE – The Hornets are headed to the district championship game!
On Wednesday night, the Weeki Wachee Hornets (15-11) blanked the Central Bears (13-13) by a 6-0 margin in the 4A District 6 semifinal behind the strong arm of Senior Pitcher Jack Strong. His pitching was painterly, but it was his bat that pushed his team over the top.
“[Jack] has sort of been doing it for four years for us,” Hornets Head Coach Patrick McHugh said. “He is a senior leader. When it came to this week, there is only one guy that I can hand the ball to the first game, and it was going to be him. As he goes, we go. He’s been that way, he’s been dominant for us, and we understand what we are going to get from him every night.”
The Green and Black’s senior leader would record 9 strikeouts while pitching a complete game and only surrendering two hits to Bears batters. Strong also belted a bouncing single to center field that ran Jase Kelly and Christian Zahora across home plate.
Though the night was far from over at the time, his pair of points in the bottom of the fourth frame would prove to be the game’s go-ahead runs in the end.
Coach McHugh added that Strong’s crucial hit with bases loaded “broke the seal for us.” Immediately after Strong batted in the first two runs, Jacob Barnum blasted his own bouncing double to send Saul Melendez home.
The home team’s final run of the inning saw none other than Strong running home following Jayden Allen’s hit being caught in the outfield. Weeki would tack on two more insurance runs across the fifth and sixth stanzas for good measure.
Central would threaten in the top of the fourth shortly before Strong’s RBIs, but a throw out at first would nullify Senior Korbin Baskind’s would-be scamper across home plate. This was a reversal from earlier in the season as the Bears had bested the Hornets twice by a combined score of 9-2 across two matchups. This left the home team scratching their heads at times early in the year.
The score in the fifth frame felt particularly like a backbreaker for the Bears, too. An error turned a routine pop fly that would have ended the inning into a triple and a Zahora score.
Shortly after, banter between both side’s fans became more pronounced, and the umpires elected to eject both bleachers full. This left only the players, coaches, referees, and other essential staff to finish out the match.
Fans did not miss too much, though. Strong finished out the sixth and seventh frames quickly, and Weeki scored their final aforementioned run en route to advancing to the district final. With Central’s season almost assuredly over, Coach Sorrentino is now set to retire as the head man of the Bears.
Weeki Wachee’s coach noted some key aspects that led to his squad’s victory on Wednesday: “It was really just getting the ball in play when it needed to be in play” and “staying away from strikeouts […] our guys have grown throughout the year and they are sort of a grinding group right now and they are real fun to coach.”
Looking ahead to their monumental matchup with the Pasco Pirates, Coach McHugh and company are hoping to “get our offense going a little earlier” than the fourth inning. While pitching is “who we are,” he added, the Hornets will likely need all hands on deck to scupper the Pirates on Thursday.
