After two loses against tough 1A opponents, the Liberty Bell High School baseball team returned to 2B league play for a double-header sweep over Oroville last week.
On April 22, the Mountain Lions traveled to Chelan to face the state’s No. 5-ranked 1A team. While Liberty Bell lost 6 – 0, coach David Aspholm said it was a good experience.
“This was a well-played baseball game by both teams,” Aspholm said. “Our boys measured up well, we just had not quite enough offense to match up with Chelan’s.”
“We had a plan for our pitchers to throw between 40 – 50 pitches each,” the coach continued. “The experience that we gain going against quality hitters only help us down the road and hopefully will make a difference come playoff time. Even though we had three errors, I’d say all of our coaches were pleased with the improvements being made defensively.”
Peter Aspholm, Noah Holston and Dusty Patterson had the Mountain Lions’ three hits.
Cascade, another 1A team, visited Liberty Bell on April 25 and came away with a 12 – 1 victory.
“Hopefully this was the case of two steps forward and one back,” coach Aspholm said. “Again we had the chance to play well with a 1A school but we could not get out of the second inning fast enough. They scored eight in the second and then another four in the third and that blew it wide open.”
Liberty Bell had four hits and three errors.
The Mountain Lions traveled to Oroville on Saturday and took out their hitting frustrations on the Hornets, pounding the home field pitchers for a 25 – 1 win in the first game of a double-header.
“Dusty Patterson pitched four strong innings and we took advantage of many Oroville miscues as well some timely hitting,” the coach said.
The second game was headed for a similar outcome as Liberty Bell had a 10 – 0 lead by the third inning, but Oroville ran out of pitchers and forfeited, so the game will go down as a 1 – 0 win for the Mountain Lions.
Last week’s games left Liberty Bell with a 7 – 5 record in league play, putting them in third place behind Brewster and Tonasket, and a 7 – 8 overall record. The Mountain Lions faced Chelan again in a home game on Tuesday (April 30), and will host Bridgeport on Friday (May 3) starting at 4:30 p.m. District play begins on May 11.
