East Gaston beats Olympic, earns right to host playoff game
CHARLOTTE — The situation was simple for East Gaston on Monday. A win meant a home playoff game. A loss would result in a first-round trip to the mountains.
The Warriors stepped off the bus with a sense of purpose and ran away with a 15-3 six-inning victory at Olympic in a tiebreaker game for the MEGA-7 3A/4A Conference’s No. 2 Class 4A playoff seed.
“This was a total team effort today,” East Gaston coach Randy Sellers said. “This was the ballclub we had earlier in the year.”
East Gaston (12-10) will open the 4A state playoffs Friday at home against Northwestern No. 2 seed Watauga (16-9).
As the MEGA 7’s third 4A seed, Olympic (11-14) will visit the Mountain Athletic No. 2 seed.
East Gaston and Olympic finished conference play with 7-5 league records and split the regular-season series. East Gaston won the first meeting 7-0 and lost the rematch 7-4.
This time, East Gaston pounded out 12 hits, took advantage of five errors and led from the first inning. Zac Bumgarner went 3-for-4 with a two-run triple while Logan Armstrong, Kevin Conn and Brandon Bates added two hits each.
Conn also tallied four RBIs, including two on a first-inning triple that gave East Gaston a 2-0 lead. Conn later scored on Bates’ single to make it 3-0. The Warriors scored one run each of the next three innings before the game got out of hand with four runs in the fifth and five more in the sixth.
“We had a lot of life in that dugout when we first started,” Sellers said. “We scored early, had baserunners every inning and moved runners over.”
Bates (3-5) held Olympic to three runs on six hits over the first five innings. The junior left-hander struck out six and walked four. Bates pitched a shutout through the first three innings despite giving up a leadoff hit each time.
Jay Puckett, East Gaston’s ace and a Belmont Abbey signee, shut the door in the final inning. Although he surrendered a leadoff single, the Warriors turned a double play and Puckett struck out the final batter.
Olympic scored all of its runs in the fourth thanks to three walks, an RBI single by Tyler Byrnes and a two-run single by Jamie Dey. The youthful Trojans started one senior, two juniors, six sophomores and a freshman.
“You’ve just got to make the basic baseball plays and we just haven’t done that,” first-year Olympic coach J.P. Culp said.
Dey and Cason Beatty had two hits each for Olympic. Colin Kellermeyer took the loss, giving up 11 runs in five-plus innings.
You can reach Phillip Gardner at 704-869-1843.
