Oak Grove had few answers for Brandon’s ace pitcher Jackson Clark.
The Bulldogs’ ace pitcher pitched a complete game and struck out 10 batters to help hand Oak Grove a 6-3 loss to Brandon in Game 1 of the Class 7A South State Championship series on Tuesday.
“He’s a really good pitcher,” Oak Grove coach Chris McCardle said. “He keeps the ball down and mixes pitches up. Their coach called a good game for him, and we didn’t make the right adjustments that we needed to.”
Oak Grove (25-6) took an early 2-0 lead after Mac McDaniel hit an RBI single and Kendrell Roberts scored on a passed ball.
However, the Warriors’ starting pitcher Maddox Miller fell into trouble in the third inning as he surrendered a 2-run triple and then allowed another to score from a fielder’s choice to give Brandon a 3-2 lead.
The Bulldogs maintained the momentum in the fourth inning as Tai Jones hit a 2-run home run. By the end of Miller’s night, he surrendered five runs off five hits, walked four batters, and struck out five.
“Maddox did a good job, and Brandon has a good lineup,” McCardle said. “He battled and kept us in the game. We started out pretty good at the plate, but Clark settled in. He really just shut us down in the middle innings, and then they got key hits with people on base.”
Oak Grove picked up one more run in the seventh inning by an RBI triple from Roberts, but the effort was too little, too late.
“We scattered hits around, but the difference was that their hits counted with people on base,” McCardle said. “We just didn’t do enough offensively to get anything going.”
Clark, who threw 112 pitches, only gave up six hits and walked just two batters.
“Brandon has a good team, like everybody knows, but we just need to put more pressure on them,” McCardle said. “We need to do a better job offensively than we did tonight, then we’ll be okay. I didn’t think two runs would be enough. We have to put more pressure on them in the middle innings.”
Oak Grove will go on the road to face Brandon tonight at 7 p.m.
“We can’t focus on it being the last game of the year,” McCardle said. “We have to focus on it before the next game. We responded well over the past year after having a bad game.”
Follow @PineBeltSPORTS on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
