By Scott Dudinskie
The Daily Item
HUGHESVILLE -- Reynaldo Adames is a terrific ballplayer; his stick, glove and wheels are all well above average.
As a pitcher, his stuff is tailor-made for the closer's role: gas no one wants to see in the late innings with a tough-to-pull-the-trigger curve.
He iced Milton American Legion's one-run win Wednesday with 11 pitches, eight of them strikes.
Adames got the start in Thursday's West Branch playoff game and, once again, pounded the strike zone. But it didn't take long for second-seeded Hughesville to figure out his first pitch was the ticket.
Hughesville scored seven runs in the first four innings, helped by a six-run fourth, and all but one of the team's seven hits in that span came on the first pitch.
Milton rallied with four runs in the last two innings and got the tying run to the plate with no outs in the seventh, but Brett Diehl slammed the door for a 9-6 win.
"We'd never seen Adames pitch before, but we said we'd try to hit his first fastball. That's what we were looking for," said Hughesville manager Gary Gordner. "I usually like to give (an approach) one time around the batting order. We'd seen him that one time around and adjusted pretty well."
Hughesville, which received a first-round bye, faces the Jersey Shore-Williamsport winner today in the winners' bracket final. Milton (1-1) hosts Watsontown (0-1) today in an elimination game.
Adames breezed through Thursday's first inning with six pitches. In the second, Hughesville loaded the bases with two first-pitch hits and a hit batsman, and Brendan Bonnell was hit with a pitch to force in the game's first run.
The third inning saw four Hughesville hitters take three first-pitch strikes and work the count for 20 pitches overall, leaving a leadoff walk stranded at third. Post 35 went back to swinging early in the fourth and broke open a 1-1 game. At one point in the fourth, Hughesville scored five runs over four consecutive pitches.
"They were attacking the first strike from the get-go, and, with Reynaldo, his fastball is more flat and doesn't have a lot of movement. As an opposing team, that's what you should have been looking for," said Milton manager Dave Byers. "You got to give them all the credit in the world; they were up there hacking."
Three singles (two on the first pitch) and a walk loaded the bases with a run in for the meat of Hughesville's lineup. Ethan Showers drilled a first-pitch single through the right side, scoring two, and Diehl followed with a first-pitch RBI double to the left-center gap. Byers made the move to reliever Damion Moyer, but his first pitch skipped to the backstop allowing a run to score. Moyer's next pitch was a run-scoring groundout for a 7-1 lead.
Adames threw first-pitch strikes to 16 of the 21 Hughesville batters he faced.
"At the beginning of the game we just wanted to see how he was," said Diehl. "Once we saw his pitches and got used to it, we hit pretty well."
Diehl, the Heartland Athletic Conference Division II Player of the Year the past high school season, could have ended the game with a grand slam in bottom of the fifth. Mark Artley fanned him with an off-speed pitch.
He got another chance to end the game with the bases loaded in the seventh, called on to protect a rapidly shrinking lead. Milton's Josh Brown jacked a two-out, two-run homer in the sixth, and Post 71 used a leadoff error, three straight walks and Adames' steal of home to pull within 9-6 in the last inning. Diehl, facing the bottom of the order, wrapped two strikeouts around a pop-up to the mound to end it.
"I've been in those situations quite a bit this year and in past years and I feel confident," he said.
"Everybody got a chance to play, and we still put a scare into them," said Byers. "Now we have to play five straight days (to win the tournament)."
