ELMWOOD — With the pitchers for both squads absolutely dealing, Pierce County rivals the Elmwood Expos and Spring Valley Hawks played nine hotly-contested innings, with the Expos prevailing 2-1 Saturday.

Both teams are clawing for top-three spots in the league standings, and Elmwood’s win moved them to 7-5 in league play. Spring Valley’s loss by no means took them out of the running, as they entered the Fourth of July break with a 7-2 league record, good for third in the 10-team league, and a half game out of second. As of July 20, Elmwood sits in fourth in league play with a 7-5 record, and Spring Valley is in second with a 10-4 record.

“Good pitching and good defense can win baseball games is my main takeaway from today,” Elmwood Manager Tom Sauve said. “We didn’t really hit the ball a ton today. We just had some kind of timely things happen when they needed to.”

Baserunning is the name of the game for this Elmwood squad, as they like to get aggressive to steal runs from teams. This was evident to any of the fans in attendance, as the first run of the game came off a hit and run worthy of a tutorial video for young baseball players.

With Brayden Wolf taking off from first base in the second inning, Spencer Trainor sliced the ball just behind Wolf into the left-center gap, allowing Wolf to round the bases and come all the way home. Sauve said the team is able to be aggressive on the bases because they are both smart and athletic.

“Be aggressive. I think that’s just kind of our mentality,” Elmwood starting pitcher Eli Ponath said. “We like to run on people. We like to make them make errors.”
The second run of the day was also manufactured from aggressive baserunning, as a steal of second from Tyler Churchill, followed by a dropped third strike and dropped ball at first brought home a second run for the Expos to take a 2-0 lead in the fourth.

Ponath put on an absolute show on the mound, tossing seven innings of one-run ball, striking out six. Mason Dado cleaned up the final two innings with a fair amount of ease.

“Consistency,” Sauve said. “If they weren’t throwing strikes, they were right around the zone the whole time. There weren’t a whole lot of real bad misses today.”

Both teams controlled the strike zone all afternoon, with Elmwood walking a pair of batters and Spring Valley walking just one.

For Ponath, it was just about getting a feel for each batter’s tendencies and finding his groove.

“I was feeling good,” Ponath said. “Getting a good read of the batters and how they’re reacting to pitches and how I can work my pitches off of that.”

The defense also made their fair share of plays to back up Ponath, including a pair of diving catches in right field from Wyatt Sundby and some nifty plays at third from Wolf.

With the final stretch of games ahead before postseason play, Sauve said things are setting up nicely for the squad to bring home wins and build momentum.

“We like how our schedule lays out the rest of the year,” Sauve said. “We’ve got a lot of teams that are either right below us or down towards the bottom of the division, and we see some of those teams twice still. So, the second half of the season is just going to be about playing our kind of baseball.”

For Spring Valley, manager Erik Thompson said they have been playing good baseball all year long, and they just need to get back to it to finish out the year. Thompson said the team has come away with wins when the other team has missed scoring opportunities, and it got the best of them this time around.

“We just didn’t take advantage of our opportunities today,” Thompson said. “I think at one point through the middle innings we had 10 guys left on base.”

Thompson was impressed with the performances from his trio of pitchers that combined to allow a pair of runs over nine innings.

“Our strength is our pitching, and I think that was evident today,” Thompson said. “But I think our offense is just fine too. We didn’t have a few of our middle of the order guys today, which I mean, sure you can mention that, but they were missing a couple guys too I’m sure.”