After going 3-1 in the Bee Line Monogram’s Southwest Louisiana Shootout, the Sulphur Tor baseball will play the Iowa Yellow Jackets for third time this season a home today at 5:30 p.m.
The Tors have made major strides in their play and head coach Ron Riley hopes that will carry into today’s game against a team that has already beaten the Tors twice and will have to play them for a fourth time next week.
“Hopefully what we did especially on Saturday will carry over into this next game,” Riley said. “If we can play good defense and make the routine outs and get some timely hitting and get the pitching that we have been getting then we will put ourselves in a good position to win ball games.”
In two previous games, the Yellow Jackets (6-2) beat the Tors (5-4) 3-1 and 10-5 both with the help of pitcher Madison Lachney who picked up the win in both games while allowing just one hit in eight and one-third innings.
Although Riley was not sure if the Tors would face Lachney again, he said that it does not matter who is on the mound the Tors will have to learn to hit anything.
“It is stuff that we are going to see game in and game out,” Riley said. “We have to become better hitters and learn how to hit that.
“The thing right now more than anything else is the breaking ball. We are behind on that and we don’t have any confidence with it. When we get somebody throwing a lot of breaking ball then we forget about the fastball and it gets us hitting backwards.”
Senior Troy Scott is expected to start on the mound for the Tors after throwing three innings of no-hit ball in relief against the DeRidder Dragons on Thursday.
The key to the Tors recent success rest heavily on the arms of the Tors’ pitching staff.
In the last three games, the Tors’ hurlers have struck out 23 batters while allowing just three walks and two hit batters. In Sulphur’s most recent game, Cade Andrus pitched a complete game in a 2-1 win over Sam Houston while having a strike to ball ratio near 3-to-1.
Although the Tors entered the season with only one pitcher with starting experience in Chad Miller, Riley feels that instruction from pitching coach John Thompson who played in Major Leagues is paying off.
