Rochelle bats remain cold in loss to Belvidere

Bucs hold Hubs to four hits en route to 4-1 win

Russell Hodges
Posted 3/28/17

Hubs varsity baseball coach Jarrod Reynolds isn’t quite sure why his boys aren’t doing much damage at the plate, but the purple and white will need to find some answers soon.

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Rochelle bats remain cold in loss to Belvidere

Bucs hold Hubs to four hits en route to 4-1 win

Posted

ROCHELLE — Hubs varsity baseball coach Jarrod Reynolds isn’t quite sure why his boys aren’t doing much damage at the plate, but the purple and white will need to find some answers soon.

After scoring just five runs over their first two games of the season, the Hubs mustered up just one run on four hits in a 4-1 loss to the Belvidere Bucs on Wednesday at Rochelle Township High School. The loss sends Rochelle down to 0-2-1 overall.

“For whatever reason we’re not making a whole lot of solid contact,” Reynolds said. “We’ll keep working on it, we’ll keep improving and I’m confident that the kids will be able to come around.”

It wasn’t a very good day for baseball, with both wind and rain keeping both offenses contained for most of the game. But sophomore Hub Johnny Beck was on his game once again, firing five and two-thirds innings and striking out seven batters while allowing just two hits and one earned run.

“Johnny’s a good pitcher,” Reynolds said. “He’s got a good fastball and he was doing a good job of throwing strikes. He’s done a great job for us thus far and it’s a shame that we aren’t able to take advantage of good pitching. I have no complaints with anything Johnny’s done for us. We just need to score more runs for him.”

Both teams went scoreless through the first three innings before Belvidere went up 1-0 on a wild pitch in the top of the fourth inning. The Bucs went down quietly in the fifth inning, but the purple and gold tacked on three runs in the top of the sixth to make it a 4-0 game.

The Hubs scored their lone run in the bottom of the sixth, with Beck fittingly earning an RBI off a single to score sophomore Brandon Johnson and cut the Belvidere lead to 4-1. Johnson and juniors Ralfy Mancinas and Brendon Danekas each notched hits earlier in the game, but it wouldn’t be enough to rally past the visitors Wednesday evening.

“I don’t think the weather really played into today’s game, I just think for whatever reason we didn’t hit well,” Reynolds said. “It was cold for the other team too, and I really thought, outside of a couple moments, that the weather wasn’t that bad… We just didn’t put the bat on the ball enough.”

Rochelle will try again for its first win of the year when the Hubs face Freeport on Saturday. As expected, Reynolds said the offense will need to start picking it up if the boys hope to get themselves a victory this weekend.

“We have to score more runs,” he said. “We’ve had three games and we’ve scored six runs total. That’s not going to cut it… We have to give ourselves a margin of error by scoring a few runs to give ourselves a chance.”