After shutting out Beebe 7-0 in the opening round of the Junior American Legion State Tournament, Benton Sport Shop’s season came to an end on Sunday when Benton fell 6-3 to Texarkana at Gary Hogan Field in Little Rock. Sport Shop lost 3-1 to Paragould on Saturday to fall to the loser’s bracket.
“The bats went cold, really the whole weekend,” Sport Shop Coach Michael Mattox said. “We scored a few against Beebe, but after that, Paragould and Texarkana both, we just couldn’t get anything going. We weren’t striking out or anything like that, we just weren’t hitting the ball hard and right at people; a lot of weak groundballs.”
Sport Shop won the Junior Zone Tournament in Sheridan last week after playing its best baseball of the season. Benton took advantage of Beebe errors Friday as only three of the seven runs were earned, but the lack of hitting the next two tourney games came back to bite Benton.
“You play at your highest level you have all season long a week ago, it’s hard to bring it back,” Mattox said. “The kids played hard. We were right there the Paragould game, a 1-run game going into the seventh. We just couldn’t get that hit and it carried over into (Sunday) against Texarkana. Both (opposing) pitchers did a really good job of getting the leadoff guys out, so we couldn’t run our small-ball game.”
On Sunday, Texarkana scored one run in the first before Benton tied things at 1-1 in the third, but Texarkana responded with two in the bottom of the inning for the 3-1 lead. But errors late would come back to haunt Sport Shop.
“The defense had a hiccup on Sunday,” Mattox said. “We’ve been pretty solid on defense, but late in the game we had a couple of errors that cost us some runs.