Peetz Falls to Caliche

Peetz's Bulldog baseball team traveled to Caliche on Tuesday to face the Buffaloes, and lost their third game of the season by a lopsided 21-to-1 final score. With the Bulldogs in a rebuilding mode, head coach Trevor Nienhauser has his work cut out for him as the team works to sharpen fundamentals and searches for effective pitching solutions.

The Bulldogs were held scoreless by the Buffaloes in the first inning, then Peetz junior starter Mike Turpin took the mound for the bottom of the first. Turpin had great movement on his breaking pitches, but struggled with control and placement. The Buffaloes were able to figure out Turpin's offerings, collecting hits in between walks and hit batters to put up 17 runs in the first innning.

The Peetz defense struggled with swirling winds that made routine pop flys turn into wild adventures and defensive miscues that gave away outs. The bright spot of the game for Peetz was the second inning pitching performance of senior Xavier Runge.

"Xavier is our only senior player this year. He's the team captain and is a switch hitter," said Nienhauser.

After striking out the first batter he faced, Runge gave up a long stand up triple to the second batter he faced, but then bared down and struck out the next two batters. On the third out, the ball was mishandled by the catcher on the third strike allowing the batter to reach first and score the runner from third. Runge recovered and struck out the next batter, Caliche's Clayton Funkhouser, to end the inning.

"We had a lot of mental and physical errors today, which is to be expected with such a young team. Fielding will definitely be the focus of practice this week," said Nienhauser.

Peetz next hosts Merino on Thursday at 11a.m.