BRISTOL, Va. – Haydn McGeary of the Bluefield Ridge Runners hammered a prodigious 408-feet home run in the first inning of Saturday night’s Appalachian League game against the Bristol State Liners.
That turned out to be just the beginning of a miserable evening for the home team at DeVault Stadium.
Bluefield bashed out 20 hits and drew 16 walks in administering a 22-2 beatdown to Bristol in a game that put a screeching halt to the four-game winning streak for the State Liners.
Bristol (9-19) trailed 13-2 after two innings and burned through six pitchers in the team’s worst performance of 2022.
Joshua Heath (West Virginia) and Jackson Feltner (Morehead State) also blasted longballs for the Ridge Runners.
“It’s great when everybody’s clicking, everybody’s hitting,” McGeary said. “We got rained out [Friday] night and a lot of us were eager to play. We’re starting to feel good at the plate.”
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Bristol’s pitchers certainly didn’t feel good on the mound.
Cohen Feser (2-4, 6.00 ERA) had allowed just seven earned runs in his first five starts of the season, but the right-hander from Texas Christian University was tagged for nine runs on six hits in just 1 2/3 innings on Saturday.
The Ridge Runners scored nine runs in the second inning and did so on just two hits as Bristol’s three hurlers used in that inning kept missing the strike zone.
“[Bluefield manager] Mike [Weatherford] talks a lot with us about not swinging at bad pitches and getting ahead as a hitter early in the count,” McGeary said. “If the guy’s willing to throw a first-pitch strike you can jump on it, but we weren’t getting a lot of those. It just all came together.”
Carlos Gonzalez from Inwood Academy in New York had the worst outing for the State Liners, however, as he faced five batters – walking four of them and plunking the other.
He has yet to get an out in his two appearances this season and has thrown just 26 of his 34 pitches for strikes in those outings.
Outfielder Blake Wood ended up pitching the final two innings and had his struggles. He is a two-way player at Florida State College in Jacksonville and it was his third appearance on the mound for Bristol this summer.
“Nah, I had not [planned on pitching Saturday],” said the 19-year-old. “I hadn’t thrown in a while.”
The diminutive Wood has become a fan favorite with how hard he plays the game. The 5-foot-9, 180-pound Georgia native struck out to start the ninth inning, but when the pitch from Yadiel Omar Cuadrado got away from the catcher, Wood still sprinted to first base in a contest in which his team trailed by 20 runs.
“I’ve always been the small guy, but hustle and God is what got me here,” Wood said. “Why quit the two things that got me here? I go out there and compete with what God gave me. He gave me a lot and I just try to use it to His glory.”
A 6-foot-5, 235-pound catcher, McGeary has plenty of talent as well and he was a triple shy of the cycle Saturday. He had a RBI single in the second inning, a double in the third inning and a single in the eighth inning to along with his first-inning home run.
A former NCAA Division II player of the year at Colorado Mesa University, McGeary is transferring to the University of Kentucky and will be slugging in the Southeastern Conference.
“I love Colorado Mesa and it’s been my home the last four years,” McGeary said. “We’ll see what happens with the [MLB] draft this year, but I wanted to go somewhere else and move on in some way. I challenged myself and what better way than to go to the SEC.”
Bristol will face the challenge of bouncing back from Saturday’s debacle when the State Liners play Bluefield (11-17) today at Bowen Field.
“That’s baseball,” Wood said. “You can’t plan those kinds of losses, you’ve got to forget ‘em, because we get to show up the next day and play. Today sucked, yeah, but if we sit here and marinate on it we’re going to suck [Sunday] too. You have to have a short memory.”
NOTES: Eric Erato (Northern Illinois) went 3-for-4 for Bristol, while the runs for the State Liners came in the second inning when James Holladay (Barton College) delivered a two-run single that plated Jeremy Garcia (Bethune Cookman) and Blake Wood (Florida State College-Jacksonville). … All nine hitters for Bluefield drove in at least one run. … Tennessee High graduate Daniel Hicks (Rhodes College) went 0-for-3 for Bristol, while former Abingdon High School standout Luke Francisco (Carson-Newman) was 0-for-2 in the loss. … Bristol’s game today in Bluefield begins at 6:30 p.m. The State Liners host the Ridge Runners on Monday at 3 p.m.