03/28/2024
Spread the love

The East Bladen baseball, jayvee baseball, softball and girls soccer games that were scheduled for Tuesday night have been moved up and will be played tonight (Monday) at St. Pauls.

“They went around the baseball booking agent, found some umpires and are forcing us to play tonight,” said East Bladen Coach Grant Pait. With the difficulties that schools have encountered getting enough baseball umpires, on the surface it sounds like a reasonable move. However the problem for Coach Pait and East Bladen is that the rescheduling costs him a pitcher for tonight.

Eagle junior Evan Pait pitched 4 innings Friday night in a 14-4 East win at Red Springs and threw 6 pitches over the pitch-count limit to be available for Monday’s game. “They pulled a fast one on us,” said Coach Pait. “If I had known Friday night that they were moving the game up, Evan wouldn’t have thrown that many pitches.”

What rubs more salt in the wound for the Eagles is that St. Pauls and East Bladen are currently tied for third place in the Southeastern Athletic Conference standings with identical 4-2 league records behind Fairmont and Midway who are both 6-0 in the SAC-7.

After tonight the two teams will play again Thursday night at East Bladen. There are no pitch-count limits in softball, so the moving of the softball and soccer games will not have any limitations on players. The Lady Eagle softball team is 4-2 in league play compared to 1-5 for St. Pauls. East Bladen soccer sports a 4-0 SAC-7 record. St. Pauls is 0-6.

Game times for East Bladen at St. Pauls Monday night:
4 p.m. JV Baseball
6 p.m. Girls Soccer
6 p.m. Softball
6:30 p.m. Baseball

About Author