As baseball teams across Northeast Ohio begin to tune up for the postseason next week, Open Door took a trip to Brookside for a nonconference matchup.
The game teetered on a razor’s edge in the final innings, as Open Door tied the game in the fifth inning and went up one in the top of the seventh.
With good fortune on its side, Brookside’s Nick Arra placed a jam job pitch into right field and Xavier Brown worked the count full to walk it off on a base on balls with a 6-5 victory for the Cardinals.
FINAL
After the Patriots push across one in the seventh, Nick Arra Tues it up in the bottom of the frame with a base knock and Nick Arra walks it off with a full count walk@BrooksideBaseb 6@odcspatriots 5
OPD 5 5 6
BRK 6 7 1@MJournalSports pic.twitter.com/VVjRNzVetg— Sean Fitzgerald (@fitzonsportsbsr) May 11, 2023
The end result was a resilient effort by Brookside, who’d been in its fair share of similar games over the course of the season.
“We’ve been on the other side of that a few times this year,” Brookside coach Travis Baldwin said. “It feels really good to be on this side of things. It feels good to win one like that.”
With an error to lead off the home half of the seventh frame, the Cardinals loaded the bases for Arra to knock the ball the other way to plate a run when Brookside needed it most.
“Nick’s done that all year,” Baldwin said. “He’s done it every single time. He leads our team in RBIs. He’s in that spot to do that job, we trust him to do that and he did a good job at it.”
“It was up and in,” Arra walked through the pitch he put in play to tie up the game. “I got kind of lucky. It was a little jam job, a little bloop over the first baseman. I mean it works.”
Xavier Brown came up right after as the No. 4 batter in the inning, with his patience paying off in delivering the victory.
“My eye has always been really good,” Brown said. “I really don’t like to chase pitches. I like to stay safe. If it’s there, I’m going to take a swing. If it’s not there, I’m going to let it go.”
Brown, who took the bump for the home side, ceded the ball to Devin Radford after five innings. In that seventh inning when Open Door took the lead, Radford loaded the bases but found a way to get out of the jam, striking out two of his last three batters.
“Devin’s been one of our best pitchers this year,” Brown said. “He’s always very consistent, always putting the ball over the plate. That was exactly what we needed from him tonight.”
Open Door committed six errors, which resulted in two unearned runs and kept innings going. Six errors to one on the other side doesn’t lend itself to being a winning formula.
“It’s just about execution,” Open Door coach Denny Reaser said. “You’ve got to make plays and at the end of the day we didn’t. If we make a couple of plays, maybe it’s a different ballgame. But if you’re not going to score runs, you’ve got to play defense.”
Heading into the postseason next week, Brookside will host Lincoln West on May 15 in a Division II sectional semifinal while Open Door while travel to Columbia on May 18 in a Division IV sectional final.
