Wilson upset nullified

STRASBURG — Wilson Memorial had the Strasburg High School baseball team
just where they wanted them.
The Green Hornets had the momentum Tuesday night, taking a two-run lead into the bottom of the seventh inning at First Bank Park. All relief pitcher D.J. Curry needed to do was get three outs and Wilson could advance to the next round of the Region B playoffs and get a home game Wednesday.
Strasburg’s Alex Pfeiffer did not get a memo saying the Rams were supposed to bow out. Pfeiffer, a second-team all-Bull Run District selection, laced a one-out, line-drive single to right field in the bottom of the seventh for two RBI and a 5-4 comeback win for Strasburg.
“You’ve got to go into that inning thinking ‘We’ve got a chance’,” Pfeiffer said. “In that situation [his at-bat] I was just trying to drive the run in. It was a fastball inside. It kind of jammed me a little bit.”
The Green Hornets (12-11) had come in with five wins in their last seven games, and got all the clutch hits for five innings against Strasburg ace Timmy McDonald. Though the left-handed McDonald (10-0) would go on to strike out 15, Wilson Memorial took a 3-0 lead after five-and-a-half innings.
Freshman Gage Staton doubled the opposite way to left to plate Robert
Pugliese with the game’s first run in the fourth. Two more runs came across in the sixth. Alex Fisher beat out a leadoff infield hit and Pugliese got another clutch hit, slamming a McDonald pitch over the left-field wall for a two-run homer and 3-0 lead.
Pugliese had two hits and two RBI and Curry had a pair of extra-base hits, driving a double and triple. Fisher pitched well enough to win, throwing five shutout innings. He left at the end of five after making 88 pitches.
“Fish came to me after the fifth, and he told me he just ran out of gas,” Wilson Memorial coach Derek McDaniel said. “I brought D.J. in and he’s our second best pitcher. He couldn’t throw his curveball for strikes and they then sat on the fast ball.”
Strasburg (20-2) closed the gap with Josh Kibler’s two-run single in the sixth. Curry, who doubled with one out in the seventh, made it a 4-2 game when freshman Weston Cash singled through a drawn-in infield. Freshman third baseman Ryan Cale also made two solid plays to end the first and third innings, stranding Strasburg runners in scoring position in each inning to give Fisher a lift.
“It’s not like we handed it to them,” McDaniel said. “We gave up walks [four in the last two innings] and they’ll come back and haunt you. They got some key hits late, and that was the difference.”