Cyclones blanked by Eagles on the road, 5-0

In the bottom of the fourth inning in a scoreless game and Cyclone Senior Braydon Ernst on the mound for the HCHS baseball team, the Eagles offense got going scoring one run, following by two in the bottom of the fifth, and two more in the bottom of the sixth shutting the Cyclones out 5-0, handing them their seventh loss of the season.

“Really, Ernst threw the ball pretty well overall,” said Cyclone Head Coach Heath Stein. “He was just unable to get out of the strike zone from time to time. He’d get up in the count and then he’d leave one over the middle of the plate and it’d get hit. He threw well enough to win the game, but we obviously didn’t score any runs for him.”

Ernst threw six innings for the Cyclones, throwing 73 pitches, allowing five runs on seven hits, walking one, striking out five, and hitting one batter.

For the Eagles, Mason Boothby pitched 6.1 innings, throwing 109 pitches, striking out 10 Cyclones, and walking two. Gus Bashore got the final two outs of the game coming out of the bullpen.

The Cyclones offense could only muster up seven hits, six of which were singles. Brett Heese and Jozef Reisz each got two hits, along with Colton Schneider and Foxx Argotsinger. Quinn Koesters also had a double, but nothing came of it.

“Sometimes it feels like when Brett is locked in, Sorfonden is not, or vice versa,” Stein said. “When Colton is locked in, Landen is not. We need just a collective effort of guys with good mental approaches and eagerness to play the game.”

With this loss, the Cyclones move to 21-7 on the season.  Despite a tough loss with no offense, Stein is confident his team will bounce back.

“Even though we dropped this ballgame, our goals are still in front of us,” he said. “It’s been that way the whole year, but overall we’ve put ourselves in a good spot. The seeding is out so we know where we’re going and who we are playing, so really we’re just hoping to learn from the struggles that we’ve had and have a good approach moving forward.”

The Cyclones returned home Monday night at 7 p.m. to take on the 23-10 Sioux City East Black Raiders. Offensively, the Black Raiders are led by Jax Theeler who bats .358 with 38 hits and Kason Clayborne who has the most runs batted in with 35. On the mound, Clayborne has six wins, while Bohdy leads the team in earned run average with 1.40 in 50 innings pitched, and Theeler has 61 strikeouts.

“We’ve got some tough tests ahead of us,” Stein said. “Sioux City East is a really good team. We’ll definitely get battle tested and hopefully tuned up, and get ourselves ready for that postseason game on July 12.”