2 weeks Ago By Tom Fox
DALLAS — Nina Barrouk chuckled, and gave catcher Lia Riley a quick high five. Riley stuck out her glove and managed to pull in a bunt attempt by Wilkes-Barre Area’s Grace Simko, even though the ball almost rolled out of her glove. Riley just shook her head as Barrouk laughed at her battery mate.
Right now, the Dallas girls are having fun in every aspect of the game. The Mountaineers scratched six runs across the plate Thursday, and Barrouk struck out 18 Wolfpack hitters in a 6-0 league victory to extend their win streak to four Thursday . “My endurance is definitely starting to get up after pitching all of these full games,” Barrouk said.
“Coming off four straight wins, I just wanted to keep the momentum going, and leave everything out on the field. My pitches were working real well. I really took time before the game to really warm up my spin pitches, and it worked out really well for me.
” Dallas improves to 4-1 in the Wyoming Valley Conference Division 1 standings, and keeps pace with Tunkhannock and Hazleton Area, all with one loss in the league. “It keeps us right on pace with Tunkhannock and Hazleton, and Pittston is really starting to come on with 29 in their last two games. It’s not going to be easy down the stretch.
It’s a good division,” Dallas coach Buzz Buchinski said. Each time Barrouk threw a fastball, the pop of Riley’s glove echoed throughout the Back Mountain Little League complex. The velocity was there, and the senior pitcher’s command of the strike zone was precise, working both halves of the plate to keep the Wolfpack (5-7, 1-3 WVC) batters off-balance.
She struck out nine of the first 10 batters she faced, and only faced one trouble-spot in the seventh, where Barrouk punched out two straight batters after Simko and Alivia Mazurek strung together back-to-back one-out singles. “(Barrouk) is getting stronger as the year goes along,” Buchinski said. “She is starting to come into her own now as the season is going along.
She works hard. I’ve coached a lot of baseball, and she’s the hardest worker I’ve seen. You can see it in her face.
She’s just an amazing ballplayer.” The only other hit Barrouk allowed was a seeing-eye single to short right field that fell in between the second baseman and the outfielder. “She did a great job of working that outside corner, and we just weren’t connecting with those,” Wilkes-Barre Area coach Brittany Hess said.
“It’s something we will take back and work on. It just wasn’t really our day today.” Dallas (6-3, 4-1) got all the run support it needed in the first.
Sophia Maier led off the frame with a deep triple to right and scored on Sydney Haydu’s sacrifice fly to center for a 1-0 lead two batters into the first. Dallas added another when courtesy runner Caitlyn Mizzer crossed home on Carolyn Comitz’s single to right. The Mountaineers added two in the fourth on Emma Fostock’s run-scoring triple that scored pinch-hitter Lacey Youngblood, while Fostock later scored on an error.
Dallas put the game away in the fifth as another Wolfpack error led to a run, and Riley tacked on another with an RBI single back up the middle. “Six seems to be our magic number,” Buchinski said. “Nina is going to keep us in every game.
We have to do whatever we need to in order to get her some runs. We ran the bases well, and put some balls in play. Wilkes-Barre is a good team.
It seems like everyone in our division has really improved.” The top four batters in the Mountaineers order — Maier, Haydu, Barrouk and Comitz — combined for six of the Mountaineers’ nine hits, scoring four times with two RBIs. Wilkes-Barre Area’s Jordan Prushinski was 1 for 1 with a single and two walks.
“We have to clean up some of these errors, and that comes with having a young team,” Hess said. “When it’s a game like this where you are facing a strong pitcher and you aren’t connecting, the defense has to limit those mistake. We just didn’t do that today.
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