WINSLOW — Often in the season opener, a baseball team will make a handful of mistakes as it adjusts to live competition. After Wednesday’s season opening game, Winslow High School coach Aaron Wolfe couldn’t even nitpick when looking at his team’s 10-0 win over rival Waterville at Nivison Diamond.

The Black Raiders got five strong innings from starting pitcher Jake Trask, had seven hits and committed no errors in the opening game for both teams.

“First game you usually see some errors, but that was nice to see,” Wolfe said.

The game ended in the bottom of the fifth inning when Winslow’s Ben Smith singled to left field, scoring Patrick Hopkins from third base with the 10th run.

“It was a good day. I love playing Waterville, it’s always fun,” said Winslow first baseman Luke Fredette, who missed all of last season recovering from a knee injury. Fredette was 3 for 3 at the plate, including a double and two runs scores.

The Black Raiders broke the game open with six runs in the bottom of the fourth inning. Fredette’s leadoff single was Winslow’s only hit in the inning, but the Black Raiders capitalized on three walks and a pair of Waterville errors.

Winslow was aggressive throughout the game, stealing eight bases.

“I think we’ve got some team speed. We’ll have to try to utilize it. Smart base runners don’t have to be fast base runners,” Wolfe said. “We’ll continue to work on that. Today we were able to steal some. I don’t know if that’s going to be that many every game.”

Waterville had a chance to score early, loading the bases with one out in the first inning. Trask got a strikeout and a groundout to end the Purple Panthers’ threat.

“We’ve got the bases loaded early and we had a chance on a passed ball to get on the board to start the game and get up, get a little momentum, but we didn’t get a very good read on it. That’s baseball,” Waterville assistant coach Kyle Bishop said. Bishop coached the Panthers, as head coach Dennis Martin missed the game due to a family commitment.

Winslow responded with three runs in the bottom of the first. Smith led off with a single, stole second, went to third base on a wild pitch and scored on Dameron Rodrigue’s groundout to second base. With two outs, Nate Gagnon and Fredette hit back to back singles and each scored on a Hopkins base hit.

Trask threw just 63 pitches, allowing three hits and three walks with three strikeouts.

“Sometimes as a pitcher it takes a few (pitches) to get warmed up, and I think Jake was the same in the first. He got out of it and we took advantage,” Wolfe said. “He was just throwing strikes, that was the big thing, not trying to strike everybody out. He wasn’t going deep into counts. He was just letting them get it into play and his pitch count was great. He could’ve gone all seven, no problem.”

Smith scored twice and had two hits for Winslow. Hopkins scored a pair of runs. Andrew Roderigue, Cody Pellerin and Jackson Aldrich each had a hit for Waterville.

“I told them, we’ve got 15 games to go, so you can only go up after Game 1,” Bishop said.

Travis Lazarczyk — 861-9242

tlazarczyk@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @TLazarczykMTM

Copy the Story Link