The Hickory Crawdads engaged in a pitching duel with the West Virginia Power in both games of today’s double header at L.P. Frans Stadium in Hickory, North Carolina. Dustin Molleken, by far, turned in the best performance of the day during game 1 of the set. Molleken took the mound against West Virginia for six of the seven innings and held the Power scoreless. He only gave up two hits and one walk while chalking up 8 K’s before being relieved by Harrison Bishop. Today was the best performance I have seen from Molleken. Bishop and Molleken combined for a 1-0 shut out of the West Virginia Power in game 1…

Mike Felix took the mound for game 2. During his three frames, Felix gave up no hits, walked 2 and struck out 4. Dionis Rodriguez followed Felix for three more innings, giving up 3 hits and one walk while striking out 5. Moises Robles followed Rodriguez for two more innings. Robles gave up one hit while striking out two, allowing the Crawdads to edge out a second 1-0 victory of the Power in the 8th inning of game two.

As I mentioned yesterday, I can’t really complain much about our pitching so far this season. We had one bull pen member who had a bad outing on Saturday, but other than that, our pitching has been truly hardcore in the season-opening series.

After the opening series in the South Atlantic League, no one managed to win four games in either division. In the Northern Divison, Hickory is 3-1 along with Greensboro and Lake County. In the Southern Division, Asheville, Charleston, Kannapolis, and Savannah are all locked up at 3-1.

The Crawdads hit the road tomorrow for a 4-game series with Greensboro and then another 4-game series with Kannapolis. I’m not sure if I can do it yet, but I hope to hit one game in Greensboro and one in Kannapolis this week. I have never been to either park and both are fairly close to Hickory. We’ll see how it goes.

Notable Peformances after 4 games:

Pitching:

Dustin Molleken - ERA: 0.00 - IP:6 - SO: 8

Hitting:

Miles Durham - AVG: .308 - AB: 13

Hickory’s pitching after the first 4 games in the league is at the top of the list. Hickory has a collective 1.50 ERA. Hickory’s collective batting average is 4th from last with a .208. These numbers aren’t really worth discussing at this point anyway. After 20 or 25 games we’ll take a look at the standings again…

Here’s a photo just for fun…

This is Hickory’s third baseman, Bobby Spain. I’m not really sure what’s happening here, but it sorta makes me think of….

O M G… BECKY!

Maybe he’s surprised about something the rest of us don’t know about…

John M. Setzler, Jr.
(the guy with the camera)