Panther baseball has snapped a four-loss streak.
Having opened their conference schedule with a narrow win at East Henderson, Franklin faced a difficult stretch through the next two weeks, going winless in Mountain Eight series with #3 Brevard and #1 Pisgah. With another win over East and a nonconference win versus Enka, the Panthers got their regular season back on track.
On April 8, the Panthers returned to McConnell Field to rehash their 13-11 win at East Henderson last month. Franklin came out swinging in the first, scoring the game’s first run off a Hunter Lowe walk and a Paxton Sutton single.
Addix Sutton made the play of the game in the second, sparking a four-run inning with a two-run homer to left field. Franklin’s bats stayed hot in the third and fourth, scoring three more runs to extend their lead to 8-0.
East answered in the top of the fifth, scoring two runs off a single, a triple and a wild pitch. Franklin kept rolling in the bottom of the inning however, turning doubles from Paxton Sutton and Gunner McConnell into four more runs. Up 12-2 after five complete innings, Franklin triggered the 10-run mercy rule to end the game on the spot.
“[That was the] first home run in my high school career. … It was nice,” said senior Addix Sutton after the game. “We’d seen in prior pitches he was leaving the fastball kind of up. That’s my pitch a lot of the time, and he was leaving it up and kind of slower – it was a little loopy. So, I figured if I got one then I’d just try to do what I could with it, but I didn’t expect that.”
The win improved Franklin’s record to 7-5 overall and 2-4 in the Mountain Eight, good for fifth place. Despite previous losses to two Mountain Eight contenders, including two in extra innings and another by just two runs, Sutton expressed confidence for the team’s prospects moving forward.
“We’ve just tried to stay consistent, honestly,” he said. “We knew that we kind of lost some games against Brevard that we felt like we shouldn’t have lost, lost a barnburner in the last game against Pisgah, so we’re just trying to weather the storm knowing that was probably the toughest two weeks of our season right there.”
We’ve got a lot of young guys; we pitched three freshmen the other night against the best team in the conference, but we still had a chance at the end,” Sutton continued. “So if we can just keep putting runs on the board, it’s going to get better for us if we can just stay consistent.”
Two nights later the Panthers traveled to Enka for a nonconference game with the Jets. There both offenses came out swinging, with Franklin leading 5-4 after four innings. The Panthers plated three more runs in the fifth, then held Enka to one run the rest of the way to win 8-5.
Damion Bowles and Isaiah Deas led Franklin at the plate, combining to go 5-for-9 at the plate with two doubles, two RBIs and two runs scored. Caden Mason and Brayden Greenwood combined for seven innings on the mound, dealing eight strikeouts and allowing just two hits.
The wins improved Franklin’s record to 8-5 overall and 2-4 in the Mountain Eight, where they ended the week in sixth. They returned to action after press time April 13, hosting Tuscola at McConnell Field.