By Joseph Krum
Staff Writer
@joseph_krum
If one word defined Thursday night for the Coppell Cowboys baseball team, it would be struggle.
The Cowboys struggled to hit, struggled to field and struggled to pitch well in a 6-0 loss in the first game in a three-game playoff series against Southlake Carroll.
Carroll junior pitcher Matthew Canterino recorded 17 strikeouts on the night out of the 21 total outs, only allowing three hits.
Sophomore shortstop Jacob Nesbit, junior second baseman Ty Manning and junior catcher Cole Solomon recorded the three hits for the night, yet all got left stranded on base.
Senior pitcher Jensen Elliott pitched three innings, giving up four runs with five strikeouts and four hits. Sophomore pitcher John Kodros came in relief in the fourth, pitching the rest of the game, giving up a two-run blast in the top of the seventh.
“[Elliott] wasn’t on his best game tonight, and at some point you have to start thinking about Game 3 on Saturday,” Coppell baseball coach Kendall Clark said. “If you yank him early hopefully you can get a couple outs with him later. If you leave him out there longer, he won’t be able to pitch again this series. And Kodros has good stuff, so it wasn’t a hard decision to bring him in.”
As for how they hit, or the lack of, Clark knew a specific thing that they need to work on heading into tonight.
“We swung through too many fastballs,” Clark said. “They challenged us, and we just didn’t hit that pitch. I told them that they need to adjust and do a better job tomorrow in order to win.”
Kodros, who recorded three strikeouts and four hits, came in with four innings in relief.
“I thought I did well, keeping the ball down,” Kodros said. “It wasn’t until the last inning when I left a hanging curveball over the plate to their best hitter and he just took advantage of it.”
Both him and Elliott pitched multiple pitches to each batters, falling behind in some of the counts.
“We need to get ahead of the batters,” Kodros said. “We started off some of the batters with a first-pitch balls, and it just gets us in a bad position with the hitters and gets our pitch count up.”
The Cowboys will play again tonight in Argyle against Carroll again at 7 p.m. Junior pitcher Charles King is set to start for the Cowboys.