By Charles Prince

The North Jefferson News



MT. OLIVE — A strong outing by starter Seth White and an early 5-0 lead were enough on Tuesday as Tabernacle held off a late rally by Evangel to win by one run, 5-4.

“We did some good things early on,” Tabernacle head coach Tim Thompson said. “Our pitching did a good job of not letting them have too many base hits. We played well defensively and that was big. It was the first time in four games we played a whole game without an error.”

Starter Seth White scattered six hits over five innings and was working on a shutout until allowing a lead off homer in the top of the fifth inning. Evangel would later added another run in the frame to cut a 5-0 deficit down to three.

White finished with four strikeouts, walked three and hit a batter, but he got the key out in each of the first four innings after Evangel got a base runner.

“Seth threw real well for us,” Thompson said. “He didn’t get a lot of strikeouts today, but he gives us the best defense on the field when he’s on the mound. When he throws strikes like he did today, we’ve got our best defense on the field.”

White improved 3-0 after facing 26 batters over the five innings.

“My fastball really wasn’t working for me early in the game,” White said. “But my curveball was getting over early in the count and that helped a lot. I wanted to make them put the ball in play and the good defense behind me made all the big plays.”

The Torches took a 3-0 lead after one inning. Jared Higginbotham and Will Lankford both reached on errors and then stole a base. They both would score later on back-to-back dropped balls by the Evangel catcher.

Later, Tyler Marshall walked and then moved to third on Austin Thompson’s single to right center.

Marshall came home on Steven White’s ground out.

Tabernacle added two runs in the third inning, when Lankford singled and moved to third on an error. He would score on a second Evangel error in the inning.

Marshall scored the Torches fifth run when he came home on Steven White’s RBI-single to left.

Higginbotham relived Seth White and threw the final two innings.

In the sixth, he had a 1-2-3 inning, but in the seventh, Evangel used two singles, a passed ball, a walk and a dropped third strike to score two runs and pull within 5-4 with two outs, but Higginbotham got the final batter to ground out to second.