The Pirates baseball team received a 7 seed in the Nusenda 4A state baseball tournament and will host St. Teresa this Friday (6pm) and Saturday (11am and 1pm as needed).
“We are definitely expecting a tough match up,” said Grants High School baseball head coach Mike Furbee. “Our coaches are gathering more information on them–they are known to be good hitters and they don’t make a lot of mistakes on defense.”
The Pirates wrapped up district play last week on April 29 against tough district rival the Belen Eagles (18-8, 5-3) and lost 86.
“We haven’t been able to get out of our own way at times and the Belen game was one of those times,” said Furbee The Pirates went up 3 runs in the first inning and 1 run at the bottom of the 3rd inning and added 2 runs in the 4th inning. Belen scored their first run in the 4th inning and clobbered in 7 runs in the 4th inning to best the Pirates by 2 runs.
In that Belen game Niko Young pitched 4 innings allowing 7 hits, 6 runs, 6 earned runs and 1 strikeout. Estevan Barela pitched 3 innings and allowed 6 hits, 2 runs, 2 earned runs and 6 strikeouts.
Boudy Melonas led the Pirates with 3 RBI’s followed by Diego Lopez, Noah Lundstrom and Niko Young with 1 apiece.
The Pirates went on to defeat I-40 rival the Gallup Bengals (5-18, 37) on April 30th by a score of 12-1.
They wrapped up the season with a game against 5-A Los Lunas (16-10,7-1) and lost that game 8-0.
“We knew the Los Lunas game would be a tough one when I scheduled it –but knew it would be a good tune-up for state,” said Furbee.