BANGOR, Maine — Nearly unbeatable during his first three years on the mound for the Bangor High School baseball team, Trevor DeLaite yielded hits to the first three batters he faced Wednesday during the Rams’ 2016 debut against Oxford Hills of South Paris.
Aided by a rally-killing double play, the senior left-hander allowed just three more base runners over his six innings of work as the two-time defending Class A state champions pulled away to an 8-1 victory at Mansfield Stadium.
Leadoff batter Ben Crichton reached base in all four of his plate appearances and scored three runs to pace Bangor’s offense in support of DeLaite and reliever Jesse Colford, who worked a 1-2-3 seventh.
The play of the day came early, after Bailey West led off the first with an opposite-field single to right on an 0-2 pitch, reached second on a bunt single by Blake Slicer (Bangor did not cover first base in time), and scored on a single down the left-field line by Matty Smith.
DeLaite countered by creating adversity for Oxford Hills. He induced Tyler Curtis to ground to second baseman George Payne, who flipped the ball to shortstop Kyle Stevenson to start a 4-6-3 double play, and then struck out Jake Beauchesne on three pitches.
“The double play was huge,” said Bangor coach Jeff Fahey. “If they get two or three there it might change the outcome of the game.”
The rest of the afternoon was vintage DeLaite, as he and Colford combined to throw first-pitch strikes to 21 of the 25 batters they faced.
“I just try to get ahead of the batters and then make a decision about what I want to do when I’m kind of in control,” said DeLaite, who struck out 12 and walked one — whom he immediately picked off — while throwing 61 of his 77 pitches for strikes to improve his career record for the Rams to 16-1.
“My defense lets me do that. Once we got that ground ball to turn the double play, that really got us going, and in the second inning, I was able to settle in,” he said.
By the time DeLaite took the mound in the top of the second, he was staked to a 4-1 lead. The Rams sent nine batters to the plate in the first during a rally with just one ball leaving the infield — on the first of five Oxford Hills errors in the game.
“It really comes down to, yes, we’re facing DeLaite so I can accept some of the young kids striking out,” said Oxford Hills coach Shane Slicer, “but the tentative defense cost us a chance to be in the game.”
Crichton, Stevenson and Derek Fournier drew walks off Oxford Hills starter West to load the bases with one out before two runners scored when on a misplayed double-play grounder to shortstop.
Fournier came home on a sharp, one-hopper to first base by Peter Kemble and Nick Cowperthwaite scored the final run of the uprising as Ryan Brookings reached on the second error of the inning.
Crichton and Stevenson singled to ignite a two-run Bangor rally in the second. Crichton scored on Fournier’s sacrifice fly to right and Cowperthwaite followed with the hardest-hit ball of the game, a triple to deep center field.
Fournier drew a bases-loaded walk to make it 7-1 in the fourth, and Crichton’s two-out single in the fifth drove home Brookings with the game’s final run.
“The key is just seeing the pitches and getting your pitch and hitting to the appropriate spot and finding a way to get on. That’s all that matters,” said Crichton, who also led off last summer for Bangor’s state championship American Legion team.
“You definitely feel the responsibility so you want to get on base and start the inning off the right way because we feel if our first two guys get on the rest of our lineup is going to do the job, too,” he said.
