Pre-Season Baseball Classic
Louisville Legends 0, Louisville Longhorns 12
Pummel them with relentless hitting. Shut them down with dominant pitching. Odds are, if you do just one of those things in any particular game, you are going to earn a W. Do them both, and, as they say in the great state of New Jersey, home of Frank Sinatra, Southside Johnny and Tony Soprano, “You can just fuggedaboudit.” On Sunday night, in the Beechmont Pre-Season Baseball Classic championship game, the Louisville Longhorns delivered a memorable, dual-fisted performance that their crosstown rival opponents, the Louisville Legends, would most likely prefer to just forget.
With the game-time temperature hovering somewhere in the high-70s, it was unusually warm, even for the official first day of spring, but the real heat was coming from the starboard paw of fireballing flinger Matthew Higgins. Tabbed by Coach Rick Arnold to be the title game twirler, the powerful righthander quickly got down to business in the top of the first inning, striking out the Legend’s lead-off batter on three straight pitches. He would continue that level of sphere-serving efficiency throughout his entire outing, needing but 29 pitches to silence the Legends’ bats over three innings of one-hit, shutout ball.
Matthew Higgins flung three innings of 1-hit, shutout ball
to earn the victory in the championship game.
Even with apple-chucking like that, one still needs run support, and Higgins’s teammates would get him what he needed, with a little help from the Higster himself. The Longhorns would send 11 men to the plate in the bottom of the first, at one point lashing four hits in succession: a double down the left field line by Andrew Arnold and soundly-struck mono-pokes by Trey Sweeney, Nicholas Parrish and Ryan Hamilton.
Andrew Arnold was 2-for-2 in the game with 2 RBIs.
They topped that with five blows in a row in the second inning, sandwiching base knocks by Higgins, Arnold and Sweeney between twin-baggers by Casey Simon and Nicholas Parrish. That all accounted for nine runs, which certainly would have been enough, but after Andrew Littlefield and Casey Simon started off the bottom of the third with mirror-image, opposite-field base-bonks, young Mr. Higgins himself dealt the crowning blow: a three-run, four-ply, walk-off wallop over the right field fence.
Nicholas Parrish was 2-for-2 with a double and 2 RBIs.
For the second time in the tournament, the Louisville Longhorns shut out the opposing team, and, for the third time in four games, they forced the premature denouement of the contest via the run rule. When the smoke had cleared in the championship game, one could see that the scoreboard read Longhorns 12, Legends 0—a memorable result that would not be forgotten by the Longhorns, and their fans, any time soon.
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