St. George – The Dorchester Academy baseball team had a great regular season by posting a 13-3 overall record and winning the Region 1-AA championship over Calhoun Academy.
That first-place finish earned the Raiders the No. 1 seed in the lower bracket of the AA state playoffs. They rolled to a sweep of Marlboro Academy in the best-of-3 quarterfinal series to set up a semifinal matchup against Patrick Henry, the Region 2 champion and bracket No. 2 seed, which swept St. John’s Christian in its quarterfinal series.
As fate would have it, according to Dorchester head coach Brent Jackson, his squad caught the Patriots at the absolute wrong time.
Patrick Henry swept the Raiders, winning by the scores of 6-2 and 8-0 in the semifinals. The Patriots went on to win the state title 2-1 over Calhoun, but Jackson said he would have liked to have had a shot at that version of PHA.
“To be blunt with you, they were the better team in those two games,” said Jackson, whose team finished with a 15-5 record. “They were hitting on all cylinders, and there was nothing we could do about it.
“We’d hit it right at them and they made all the plays. Now, if the team I saw that played against Calhoun and made all those errors showed up, we’d have a pretty good chance. We just happened to catch them at the wrong time.”
Dorchester had four players named to the all-region team. They were seniors Manning Thompson and Ben Marchant and juniors Nick Pinckney and Connor Hartzog.
Hartzog, who started in center field, did some closing on the mound, and batted leadoff, finished the year with a .471 batting average. Pinckney started at third base and batted .415 with nine doubles, three home runs and 19 runs batted in. Thompson started at shortstop and batted .400. He only struck out twice in 85 at-bats.
Jackson said Marchant was his staff ace even though you wouldn’t know it by looking at his record.
“We only had five losses, and he lost three of them,” Jackson said with a laugh. “For whatever reason, we made a lot of errors behind him.”
Senior Kade Loggins and junior Wayland Gruber picked up most of the other innings.
Along with aforementioned seniors, the Raiders will also have to replace catcher Adam Clegg.
Jackson was pleased with the season his team put together.
“They played up to par, they did what supposed to do,” Jackson said. “We lost six seniors from
last year and a lot of people wondered about us. We just dropped three games in the regular
season, but it just got away from us when we ran into Patrick Henry in the semifinals.”
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