HAMPDEN, Maine — The Brewer Witches consider baseball a contact sport — make contact with the baseball, they believe, and good things will happen.
Coach Dana Corey’s club used consistent contact at the plate to send 11 batters to the plate during a seven-run second inning Tuesday evening, and Brewer went on to earn its fifth consecutive victory with a 13-2, five-inning conquest of Hampden Academy in a Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class A clash at Bordick Park.
Eight batters helped the Witches amass nine hits during the contest, and other sharply hit balls induced six Hampden errors that led to nine unearned runs.
“We’ve been focusing more on putting the ball in play,” said Brewer third baseman Eric White. “The first couple of games in preseason and our first game of the season against Bangor we had a lot of strikeouts and we weren’t making the defenses work.
“Tonight it showed because we put the ball in play and put pressure on Hampden’s defense and it helped us a lot.”
Brewer committed just one error behind righthanders Tyler Desjardins and Jordan Smith, who combined to allow just one hit — a two-run double by Jeremy Leong off Desjardins in the bottom of the second inning.
Desjardins worked the first three innings before Smith required just 11 pitches to retire the Broncos in the fourth and fifth.
Designated hitter Colby Small was Brewer’s lone repeat hitter with two singles, but leadoff batter Blake Birmingham scored three runs and No. 2 hitter Brandon Gendreau scored twice and delivered perhaps the key hit of the game, a two-run triple that highlighted the Witches’ seven-run second.
“Everybody’s been hitting the ball,” said Gendreau, one of nine different Brewer players to score at least one run. “Every game everyone’s been stepping up, putting the ball in play and making the defenses make plays.”
Birmingham reached on an error and scored on Jordan Richards’ two-out double to deep left to give Brewer a 1-0 first inning lead against Hampden righthander Connor Perry.
Brewer (5-1) broke the game open an inning later, capitalizing on two more Hampden errors, RBI singles by Birmingham, Yuhi Sasaki and Kyle McLain and Gendreau’s extra-base blast to deep center.
“It was a fastball middle in, and I just tried to drive it,” said Gendreau, a junior second baseman. “I was thinking three all the way, and just tried to hustle around.”
Brewer added three runs without a hit in the third inning, though White contributed a sacrifice fly, and a two-run fourth — again without a hit — enabled the Witches to extend their lead to double digits.
“We’ve started to cut down a little bit on our swings and try to do more situational hitting,” said Corey. “We’ve done a lot of that in practice, moving people over, getting people around, getting people to second base with two strikes, and putting the ball in play.
“Fortunately for us tonight we capitalized on some errors that they had and we got some hits at key points.”
