PETAL – As Tanner Beliveau hit a home run over the left center wall it seemed Petal was on its way to a dominant win over Oxford.
Despite the Panthers holding an early six-run lead, the Chargers took advantage of mistakes made by Petal’s pitching staff and scored in every inning but the first to pull out a 12-9 come-from-behind win on Tuesday night.
“(Oxford) did a great job of chipping away,” Petal coach Jake Mills said. “They didn’t get them all at once. They got the momentum in their dugout even when they were down, they had the momentum.”
Petal’s pitchers combined to give up seven walks, hit two batters, made two throwing errors and threw a wild pitch all of which allowed Oxford (8-4) to stay in the game.
“We’re not very good on the pen tonight,” Mills said. “We were not very good on the mound at all tonight. That’s very uncharacteristic of us, too.
“You had seven walks. You had two hit by pitches and two E-1s, so all in all, when we look at it in general, there were about 13 freebies. At this level, against teams like that you are not going to win a lot of games. We just didn’t pitch it well tonight. When we have double-digit hits and nine or 10 runs, then we ought to be walking away with a win.”
Behind mainly Beliveau’s bat, Petal (9-4) jumped out to a 7-2 lead by the second inning. In the first inning, the Panthers put up four runs after Beliveau hit a two-run double, followed by an RBI single by John Lindsey and Nathan Garner.
However, the Panthers’ mistakes on the mound began in the second inning with a throwing error by Kaleb Dillon after he misfired a throw to second, which scored Oxford’s first run, and then allowed a second to score. Yet in the bottom of the frame, Beliveau hit a three-run homer to build Petal’s 7-2 lead.
From there, Petal’s pitching mistakes quickly built up as Oxford (8-4) scored one run in the third inning, two more in the fourth, and then three more in the fifth to tie the game at 8-8. The Chargers then hit a three-run homer to take the lead in the sixth, which was followed by another run in the seventh and pushed the score to 12-8.
“It’s not like we got shut down in those innings,” Mills said. “We had people on base. We had bases loaded with one out and didn’t score.”
Beliveau, who was 3-for-4 and drove in six RBI, scratched in Petal’s final run in the seventh from a fielder’s choice.
“That’s earned by the way he works,” Mills said. “A lot of people don’t see that. He’s here before practice and after practice.
“He has worked for that. He has come a long way in his career here, especially in the way he is seeing pitches and buying into some things.”
Petal will host Neumann, a team from Naples, Fla. on Thursday.
“It just wasn’t a good night,” Mills said. “It’s one of those that you learn from and one that makes you sick.
“It shows that you can’t get up early then relax. You have to continue to press. No lead is ever safe. You have to continue to win innings, and they won more innings than us tonight.”
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