Walk-offs, slugfests highlight busy week for Carrollton teams

If you like your baseball and softball sedate, predictable and drama-free, Carrollton was not the place to be this week.

Between walk-off wins, offensive explosions, pitching duels and a few innings teams would probably like to forget, the Warriors’ baseball and softball crews packed just about every possible storyline into a handful of games.

Let’s pick up with the boys, who are turning their home field into something between a fortress and a haunted house for visiting teams. The Warriors finally got to enjoy home cooking after opening their season with five consecutive road games.

Carrollton pushed its home winning streak to 19 games — spanning three seasons and nearly two years — by grinding out a pair of identical 3-2 wins over Marlington and Berlin Hiland. Same score, different flavor of stress.

But first, the chaos.

Carrollton opened the week April 6 with a 10-7 win at Richmond Edison, then immediately ran into a buzzsaw in its April 8 Eastern Buckeye Conference opener at Marlington, where one catastrophic second inning turned into a 16-5 loss. It was the kind of inning where everything goes wrong at once — the walks pile up, balls find gaps, and suddenly you’re just trying to get out of there with dignity intact.

To their credit, the Warriors didn’t carry that loss with them for long because one day later, they flipped the script.

Isaac Husted delivered a complete-game gem in a 3-2 win over the Dukes (3-2, 1-1), allowing just four hits and striking out seven. After falling behind early, Carrollton answered with a three-run third inning that provided just enough offense to let Husted slam the door the rest of the way. No errors, no nonsense, just clean baseball.

Then came Saturday. Tie game. Extra innings. The kind of setup that makes coaches age five years in about 20 minutes.

Enter Cooper Haun.

With the game knotted at 2-2 in the eighth, Haun ripped a walk-off double to send Carrollton home with another 3-2 win — because apparently that’s just the preferred score now. The pitching staff did its part again, combining to limit Hiland to two runs, while the defense stayed spotless behind them.

Bottom line: The Warriors have figured out how to win the uncomfortable ones. And at home, they’re not losing.

Softball

Meanwhile, the softball team decided subtlety was overrated and opted for a little bit of everything: shutouts, slugfests, late-inning drama and just enough heartbreak to keep things interesting.

Carrollton opened the week April 8 with a 2-0 win over Howland, and if you blinked, you might have missed the scoring, but you definitely didn’t miss the pitching.

Emilee Shepherd was in full control, tossing a complete-game shutout and allowing just four hits. It wasn’t flashy, but it was effective. Two early runs — both scored by Juliaunna Miller — were all the Warriors needed.

Then came Thursday, and things got loud.

Carrollton jumped all over Alliance with four runs in the first inning and finished with 10 hits, highlighted by Miller’s home run and three-hit day. Addie Turkovich drove in three runs, and the lineup looked like it might just run away with it.

It did not.

Alliance answered with 15 hits of its own, turning the game into a back-and-forth slugfest that eventually tilted the other way in a 10-7 loss. Sometimes you score seven and feel great about it. Sometimes you score seven and still lose by three. Softball is fun like that.

Saturday didn’t exactly offer a breather.

Carrollton dropped a 5-2 game to Symmes Valley, hanging around for most of the afternoon before a three-run seventh inning broke things open. The Warriors scratched out runs and kept it competitive, but couldn’t quite land the counterpunch late.

And then came the heartbreaker.

Against New Philadelphia, Carrollton rallied multiple times, chipped away at an early deficit and forced extra innings in a game that had “coin flip” written all over it. The Warriors finished with nine hits, including three from Reagan Schneiders, and kept finding ways to respond.

But in the eighth, New Phila found one more run than Carrollton could match, handing the Warriors a 6-5 loss in a game that could have gone either way.