By RYAN WALKER
DECATUR — The Norwell baseball team breezed its way past Bellmont with a 10-0 road victory Thursday.
The Knights (11-4) are now 2-0 in Northeast 8 Conference play after a win over Leo just two days prior, something the team hasn’t done since the 2018 season.
“That’s a great feeling,” admitted Norwell head coach Dave Goodmiller after the game with a smile. “Since I’ve been head coach, we haven’t been 2-0 after the first week in the conference. We’ve always stumbled against Leo, so it’s a good feeling.”
The Knights got things rolling right from the get-go. Drew Graft led off the top of the first inning base hit and later scored on Lleyton Bailey’s single. A few mistakes by the Braves (2-5) helped the Knights take a 3-0 advantage.
More of the same would come in the second inning with another three runs. This time, Luke Graft drove in a run on an RBI single, and Curtis Ellis cleaned up the bases for two RBIs on a single to make it 6-0.
In the fourth, Norwell cruised to a 9-0 lead after Cale Mallery highlighted the inning with a ground-rule double smacked to deep left-center field to score two. Trey Bodenheimer’s sac fly capped off the inning.
The on-fire start by the Knights came out with was a step up from Monday. Goodmiller wasn’t pleased with the energy against Concordia that day, where the Knights fell 4-3 at home. The two games following that have been a different story, and the bats have been a beneficiary to that.
“I really liked our start (to the game),” Goodmiller said. “We had three runs in the first and three runs in the second. We hit some balls hard, ran the bases aggressively, and I thought that kind of set the tone and really established our offense today, and I liked our at-bats.”
Meanwhile, while Norwell’s bats did their work, Lleyton Bailey was dealing on the mound.
In his five-inning shutout, the senior pitcher only allowed two hits, struck out seven, and walked nobody. Bailey settled in and made quick work to get his team back into the dugout to swing the bat.
“Lleyton, he kept the leadoff man off, and that helps the defense so much,” Goodmiller said. “We played a nice clean game, and the infield made some nice plays. Lane Lewis at shortstop had some nice plays, Cale had some nice plays down there. That really helped getting us back in the dugout, and that’s a good rhythm to get into.”
“It felt pretty good,” Bailey said. “I just came prepared, and I knew my teammates were going to back me up on the field, and we just worked as a team.”
Considering there are multiple conference games a week at times, and pitchers can only throw a certain number of pitches to protect their arms, teams need multiple pitchers to get the job done in conference play.
In the game against Leo on Tuesday, starter Curtis Ellis fired six innings for the Knights. Despite allowing five runs, the senior kept his team in position to win 6-5. Lane Lewis shut the door in the seventh, who also can give quality innings.
Bailey’s shutout on Thursday shows that Norwell has a strong one-two punch to throw in NE8 games, and Goodmiller is comfortable with the guys he can throw in high-leverage games.
“We probably have a couple more guys on top of that we could throw in conference games,” he said. “I don’t know if we have a true No. 1, but we’ve got several guys that I feel very comfortable out there that will throw strikes and keep our defense involved and keep us in the game, so that’s nice to have there.”
Norwell will play next at Carroll starting at 6 p.m. Friday, April 28.
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