Freshman Julian Welling held Port Townsend to two hits over four innings Thursday, earning his first win as a varsity pitcher. (Johgn Fisken photo)
Get in. Get out. Move on.
That was the mantra for the Coupeville High School baseball squad Thursday, as it drilled visiting Port Townsend 12-2 on a cold, windy, wet afternoon on the prairie.
A win is a win, especially one that snaps a two-game losing streak, and Wolf coach Willie Smith was happy to take it. He just wasn’t all that impressed by it.
“Uninspired” is how he described a win that improved Coupeville to 7-6 overall, 3-1 in Olympic League play.
“A game where you’re just glad to be done with because it’s hard to garner any positives out of a game like this,” Smith said.
Then, giving it some thought, he did latch on to one positive — a fairly easy win over a weaker opponent allowed him to play his young guns for most of the day.
With freshmen and sophomores dominating the lineup, he was able to rest his older stars.
That could be useful as the Wolves head into the final two weeks of play.
With a non-conference game Friday at Meridian now cancelled, Coupeville has five regular season games remaining. All are league contests, and two are against undefeated Klahowya.
With that in mind, Smith held out his big three pitchers (Aaron Curtin, Aaron Trumbull and CJ Smith), opting to use Julian Welling on the hill instead.
The freshman responded, earning his first varsity win by tossing two-hit ball over four innings.
Hunter Smith closed out the game, called early thanks to the ten-run mercy rule, with a nearly flawless fifth.
Welling’s fellow frosh walked the first batter he saw, then closed out the game one-two-three.
At the plate, Coupeville combined eight hits with nine Redhawk errors to pile up their runs.
While he was grateful for the help, Willie Smith would have liked to have seen his hitters take more control of the game.
“We didn’t really tear the cover off the ball,” he said. “Yes, the pitching was not good, yes, the velocity was below average, and yes, we need to be better at the plate.
“We are just not getting good wood on the ball right now and that is a bit concerning, but these guys are good hitters and are capable of putting together better at-bats than what we’ve been doing.”
The Wolves scored one in the first (an RBI single from Hunter Smith), two in the second (a two-run single from CJ Smith), three in the third (five errors and an RBI single from Welling) and three more in the fourth (keyed by Clay Reilly’s RBI single).
Coupeville capped off a game in which it scored in every inning by tacking on three more in the fifth, with Hunter Smith and Trumbull notching RBI singles.
In addition to Welling and the younger Smith brother, the Wolves got solid work from freshmen Joey Lippo and Cameron Toomey-Stout and sophomore Jonathan Thurston.
