Yant celebrates with win over Benton
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By ROB PATRICK
BRYANT TIMES
BENTON — Scotty Yant couldn’t remember the last time he pitched his team to win over Benton, so when he limited Benton’s McClendon TV and Appliance AAA American Legion team to four hits in a 6-3 win on Friday, May 31, it was a double pleasure.
“It means a bunch,” he stated. “It makes a good birthday present today.”
Yant turned 18 that day and his team turned 6-1 on the season.
The game was reminiscent of an earlier Bryant-Benton meeting. During the high school season, the Hornets were 9-1 heading into their AAAAA-South Conference opener at home against Benton’s Panthers. Yant went to the mound and was perfect for three innings. But an error to start the fourth broke the spell. Benton tied the game at 2-2 then the game got away from Bryant in the sixth as the Panthers won 10-2.
This time, Yant was perfect for four innings before a lead-off walk in the fifth. He retired the next two before Bryan Greer broke up the no-hit bid with a liner down the right-field line for a triple. Benton scored twice to cut Bryant’s lead to 4-2 but Yant got a big strikeout to end the inning, the Sox got both runs back in the sixth and went on to the victory.
“(Greer) timed my pitch and got a good hit and the guy scored,” Yant recalled. “I was kind of upset.”
Sox coach Craig Harrison made a trip to the mound after Jacob Perry singled in Greer.
“(Yant) was juiced,” Harrison said. “He said, ‘I’ll get out of it.’ But we made sure Cody (Dreher) was loose. I said what we want to do here is not let this thing get away from us like we did at Sylvan Hills (in the May 20 season opener). We learned from that experience. Let’s take this each batter at a time. Don’t try to rare back and try to throw this past the guy at 90 miles an hour. Be a pitcher and our defense will come through for you.
“Just stay composed. That’s the main thing,” Harrison emphasized. “These kids get in these games, the crowd gets going and they have the tendency to lose their head. I said, ‘Just stay composed, do your job and if you need some relief, we’ve got it ready over here.’”
“I just took deep breaths and tried to get back in my rhythm,” Yant said.
The count went to 3-2 on Grant Jordan who stayed alive when a foul pop fell just beyond the reach of a hustling Cody Graddy after the catcher tracked it down at the fence near the Bryant dugout. Yant humped up on the next pitch and Jordan couldn’t catch up with the delivery, going down on strikes to end the inning.
“He came in after that and he said, ‘I’m done, I’m dead,’” Harrison said. “I said, ‘Okay, Dreher’s ready.’ But (Yant) came back and said he wanted to try to continue. His pitch count was good. He said, ‘I’ll just tell you.’ He goes out and strikes out the first two in the next inning, they get a (bad-hop) hit then he gets an out on a fly and comes back in and says, ‘I want to go.’
“He went out there in the last inning and really showed some composure,” Harrison noted.
With two out, a walk, an error and a single produced a run and brought the potential tying run to the plate in Benton star Jamie Fugitt. But Yant got him to bounce back to the mound for the final out.
“You know, we’ve been over here before and we’ve had a 6-2 lead on them and two outs and nobody on just like tonight and they scored five runs and beat us,” Harrison recalled. “You try to get those things out of your head but they’re still there. But Scotty came back and we got us a big win.”
Despite their record, the Sox don’t feel like they’re playing that well yet. Yant said the ingredients are starting to fall in place as he credited his teammate’s defense.
“If we play defense like we did tonight, we have defense and pitching,” Yant said. “Our hitting will come around and we’ll be real tough.”
The defensive work was highlighted by first baseman Derek Chambers who made a tough scoop of a low throw to preserve Yant’s perfecto (for the time being) in the third. On the final out of that inning, Chambers tracked down a pop foul behind first and reached over the six-foot fence to make the catch.
“This was a big win,” Harrison commented. “Not only because it’s our big rival but because it’s a league game. We wanted to get on top in the league (Zone 4) and get our guys some confidence. We have a good team.”
Harrison added that he didn’t plan to pitch Yant the entire game and the right-hander had to convince him to let him go out in the seventh.
“Normally, I wouldn’t leave my starter out there that long this early in the year,” Harrison related. “But we’ve got something to prove to our guys and to our fans and that’s that we have a good ball team.”
The Sox only had five hits in the game but their patience at the plate paid big dividends early when Benton’s Josh Jarman, back after a season at Pratt (Kan.) Junior College, started the game wild. Jarman walked five and hit a batter as the Sox scored three runs in the first. A.J. Nixon supplied the final tally with a sacrifice fly.
And when Jarman walked the first batter in the second, he was replaced by Josh Seamon.
It stayed 3-0 until the fourth when the Sox started to get to Seamon. Andrew Norman led off with a walk then Jeff Carpenter set down the first of his two perfect sacrifice bunts in the game.
An infield hit by B.J. Wood sent Norman to third then Matt White, struggling with his timing at the plate since his layoff following appendix surgery late in the high school season, stepped up with a sacrifice fly to make it 4-0.
After Benton cut the lead in the fifth, Norman led off the sixth with a walk. After another perfect bunt by Carpenter, Wood cracked an RBI single, taking second on a late throw to the plate.
With two down, Chambers launched a clutch RBI double to the gap in left-center to make it 6-2.
