For most of five innings Tuesday, the Wylie and Abilene High baseball teams were locked in a thrilling pitcher’s duel, competing with playoff intensity in front of an engaged capacity crowd at Bulldog Field.
With the Eagles leading 2-1 in the home half of the fifth after George Ferguson had broken a 1-all tie with an RBI single in the top of the inning, the outcome of the key District 4-5A matchup was still very much in doubt, and a narrow win one way or the other seemed all but inevitable.
But with two outs in that frame, Wylie freshman Myles McCarty launched a game-tying home run to right field, flipping the momentum on a dime. The blast kicked off a walk-fueled five-run rally that would finally give WHS some separation in a 7-2 win for the Bulldogs.
Following McCarty’s blast, WHS turned five walks, a hit batsman and an RBI single by Landon Stone into a 6-2 lead. And the Bulldogs carried that patient approach into the seventh, adding three more walks and another run to make a winner out of reliever Colby Garrett, who closed the game with 2.2 scoreless innings after Dylan Regala surrendered two unearned runs in 4.1 innings of work to start the game.
“Our kids hung in there against a really good team,” Wylie coach Grant Martin said. “Both sides battled and then we were fortunate there at the end to come out on top. I’m just super proud of the kids. We prepared for his, and I thought they did a great job tonight.
“Hats off to our guys. It’s always a battle against those guys.”
Tuesday’s game, which evened the season series between the two teams at 1-1 (AHS downed Wylie 5-0 in the first meeting on March 13), started with three scoreless innings as Regala and Eagles starter Gavin Colley matched each other pitch for pitch and out for out.
Wylie finally broke through for the evening’s first run in the bottom of the fourth, when Hudson Tuley doubled to lead off the frame, reached third on a single by Landry Pate and scored on a base hit by Blaze Ruffin to give Regala a 1-0 lead to work with.
That advantage wouldn’t last long, however, as Abilene High countered with two runs in the top of the fifth, leveling the score on a throwing error by McCarty that allowed Cash Churchill, who was hit by a pitch to lead off the inning, to come all the way around from first.
After a balk moved Cade Reese from second to third with nobody out, Regala got Xavier De La Cruz to line out to first for the inning’s first out. But with first open, the Bulldogs elected to pitch to Ferguson — a decision for which he made them pay with a sharp single into center to give the Eagles a 2-1 lead.
Garrett, who came in to relieve Regala after Ferguson’s hit, then got the next batter, Hagen Johnson, to ground into a double play to keep the deficit at one, setting the stage for the Bulldogs’ game-breaking two-out rally in the bottom half of that inning.
“We preach to them that we can’t give extra runs,” Martin said. “Last time we played them, in the first inning, three (runs) was enough. But we just talked about that during our bye week that we’ve got to live in the zone. I feel like we can play defense pretty well, and it was huge tonight that we didn’t walk a lot.
“As a whole, we pitched really well.”
McCarty kicked off the big fifth inning for the Bulldogs, sending a 1-0 offering from Colley over the right-field fence to tie the game at 2. And the Eagles starter closed his night with an uncharacteristic bout of wildness after that, walking Tuley and Gehrig Fletcher around a hit batsman to load the bases.
De La Cruz then came in and allowed all three batters he faced to reach, walking Ruffin and Regala around Stone’s run-scoring hit to leave the game with his team down 5-2. John Rangel relieved him and allowed one final run to score on another bases-loaded walk before finally escaping the inning with a deep fly out by Jace Tomlin.
“We played four and a half innings of really good baseball, but we had two and half innings of not being able to throw a strike, which has not been our norm,” Abilene High coach Brad Harman said. “But it’s baseball, and it’s like I told our pitchers, that’s just part of the game sometimes.
“Sometimes, you’re just going to miss or you’re just not going to have it. I’m not down on our pitching, just because I’ve seen what they’ve done and their full body of work. But tonight, for two and a half innings, we didn’t help ourselves out. And at the end of the day, when you’re playing a really good baseball team, you’ve got to match them, and we didn’t after Myles’ home run.”
With a 6-2 lead after five innings, Garrett handled the rest, pitching around a walk in the sixth and a single in the seventh to close the game with a pair of zeros. And in between, his team added one final run on a bases-loaded walk by Fletcher in the bottom of the sixth.
That final walk was the ninth drawn by Wylie batters, who also tallied nine hits, led by Tuley’s 3-for-3 effort with a walk, two doubles and two runs scored. McCarty also scored two runs, while Ruffin had a game-high two RBIs.
AHS finished with seven hits, led by De La Cruz’s three-hit night.
Tuesday’s outcome sets up a big rubber match between the Bulldogs and Eagles on Thursday at Abilene High’s Blackburn Field. AHS (16-7-1 overall, 6-1 in district) and Wylie (15-3-1, 4-1) are now tied in the loss column, and that third meeting will create a game of separation and determine the tiebreaker in the District 4-5A championship race.
Both coaches are expecting another playoff atmosphere in the third meeting.
“Hopefully we’ll carry some momentum into that. We’ll have a big test, we know that, but our kids are resilient,” said Martin, whose team will be facing Eagles ace Ferguson on Thursday. “It’s another game, and it’s the next game for us, so obviously it’s a big one, but we’re super excited to be in the spot we’re in.”
Added Harman: “They’re all big. In this district, they all count as one of 12. This is a one-twelfth mentality that we have, and they all count one of 12. This one’s big because it’s the next one, and we’re going to have to come out and be ready to fight tooth and nail start to finish because, again, they’re a good baseball team.
“We were able to do some things better than them the first time, and then they were better than us tonight. Now we’ve got the rubber game, and both teams are going to lay it out on the line, so we’ve got to be ready to go in 48 hours.”
DISTRICT 4-5A
WYLIE 7, ABILENE HIGH 2
| 123 | 456 | 7 | — | R | H | E | |
| Abilene High | 000 | 020 | 0 | — | 2 | 7 | 0 |
| Wylie | 000 | 151 | x | — | 7 | 9 | 2 |
Gavin Colley, Xavier De La Cruz (5), John Rangel (5), Wyatt McMillon (6) and Cash Churchill. Dylan Regala, Colby Garrett (5) and Cason Parish. W — Garrett. L — Colley. 2B — Abilene High: John Rangel; Wylie: Hudson Tuley 2. HR — Wylie: Myles McCarty.
Records — Abilene High 16-7-1, 6-1; Wylie 15-3-1, 4-1.