Young teams usually have one problem – being consistent. And the Macaws showed against Thistle that they are very much a young team still and will need to learn how to play at their level and not at their opponents level.
Thistle came out firing, scoring 2 unanswered runs in the first inning against a Macaw side who probably took this win for granted. VOB only got their first hit in the third inning and were being frustrated by Keegan “Gazza” Watson, the thistle starter.
Derick Bayliss was on the hill for VOB and settled down after the first inning to keep thistle quiet until the fifth inning when they scored another 2 runs to lead 4-1 only for the Macaws to score 2 of their own in the bottom of the fifth to make it a 4-3 game. After sitting Thistle down in the 6th inning VOB tied the game at 4-4. Thistle immediately scored one in the 7th to lead 5-4.
With one out in the 7th Marvin Mahoney was brought in to pinch hit for Damian Perkins and lined one into centre field to score 2 runs to put the Macaws ahead 6-5. Michael Scritten then replaced Bayliss and kept thistle scoreless over the next two inning to get the save.
Macaws win 6-5 and continue on their short streak, albeit by grinding this one out.
Two wins over the weekend has VOB putting some distance between the bottom teams and themselves in the race for top 6 spots for when the league splits in January to top 6 and bottom 7.
In a shortened game the kids managed to squeeze in 9 runs even though we could have amassed so much more. But due to the amount of inexperienced players we had to stop the running game which we are very good at. And play it base by base on our hits.