I believe I made a comment yesterday about how nothing good follows a lead-off home run by the opposing team… Would you believe it happened two days in a row? Mike Felix took the hit on Tuesday from Lexington’s Matthew Cusick. Today, it was the newest arm on the hill, Emilis Guerrero who took the same punishment. The good thing about today, if there was any good thing, was the we contained Lexington to a single run in the top of the first frame. They did, however, put up another one in the top of the second and another in the top of the sixth before our offense decided to step up. The Crawdads managed to put up a pair in the bottom of the sixth and another pair in the bottom of the eighth to take a 4-3 lead. All we needed to do was hold the Legends down during the top half of the 9th to put another mark in the win column.

In the bottom of the ninth, Hickory’s Adam Simon struck out Lexington’s Ronald Ramirez and then Lexington’s Matthew Cusick popped up to Hickory short stop Silvio Pena for out number two of the frame. Simon walked Craig Corrado and then gave up a home run to Collin DeLome to bring the score to 5-4 in favor of the Legends. Hickory went three-up three-down in the bottom of the 9th to close their second consecutive loss to Lexington.

The Crawdads only sacrificed two errors in today’s game compared to five yesterday. In the top of the first, Hickory’s Emilis Guerrero made a bad toss to Miles Durham at first base… a simple routine toss… botched… Immediately following that, Guerrero made a wild throw to first on a pick-off attempt that advanced the runner.

Hickory’s defense wasn’t nearly as sloppy as it was yesterday, but I think our offense was asleep at the wheel for the most part. Our best plate performance came from Miles Durham (pictured) with 2 hits (both doubles) and 2 runs scored on 4 trips to the plate. Tom Hagan was the only other Crawdad batter with more than one hit today.

I expected this series to go a little better for Hickory since Lexington started this set with a 2-10 record and a 6-game losing streak. Maybe they got tired of losing and cracked down for this road trip.

I think I forgot to mention a few things yesterday regarding transactions…

Chris Jones moved up to Lynchburgh and Victor Alvarez moved up to Altoona. Some new faces in Hickory:

Emilis Guerrero (RHP)
Tom Boleska (RHP)
Adam Simon (RHP)
Andrew Walker (C) - Replacing Jones
Silvio Pena (IF) - Replacing Alvarez

Duke Welker is on the 7-day DL with a sprained ankle…

Game 3 of this series is tomorrow evening. Maybe we can settle down and get back to some of the extremely great work we have seen before this series…

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