Andrews – Wildcats baseball entered the final week of the 2021 season with a .500 record and a chance to finish as high as third in the Smoky Mountain Conference. Unfortunately, Andrews ended the season on a low note, falling to Rosman and Swain County to finish 6-8 and sixth in the conference.
Despite the disappointing end to the season, head coach Bryan Graves was still proud of his team. With much of the roster playing baseball for the first time in two years, he thought they got better each week and were much better at the end of the season than at the beginning.
“At the first of the year if somebody had told me we would be playing for third place on the last day of the season, I would’ve said yeah right.,” Graves said. “We just weren’t very good early in the year. But the boys worked at it, they got better. We still weren’t where we needed to be, but they improved and put themselves in position to be playing for something on the last day of the season.”
The rain throughout the area last week wreaked havoc on Andrews schedule. Its game on Tuesday against the Tigers only made it to the bottom of the second inning before being called off due to bad weather. The teams agreed to make up the rest of the game Friday at Cherokee, which was Rosman’s Friday opponent while Andrews was playing close by at Swain.
The Wildcats lost to the Maroon Devils 12-2. It was their third-lowest run total in a game this season, which is a problem for a team that gains a lot of confidence from doing well at the plate.
“This team feeds a lot off their hitting,” Graves said. “If they’re hitting the ball, we can play a decent ball game. But if we don’t hit, defensively we’re just not good enough to hold teams down.”
In the makeup game against Rosman, Andrews started at a disadvantage. The Tigers were supposed to play Cherokee, but the Braves cancelled the game. That meant Rosman was coming in fresh, while the Wildcats had already played that day.
Andrews scored five runs in the bottom of the second to go up 5-3, but was unable to hold the lead. The Tigers led 9-5 heading into the bottom of the seventh, and the Wildcats scored one run and had the tying run at the plate before their rally came up short.
Andrews loses five seniors from this year’s team and will be young next year, though Graves said there’s a good group of eighth-graders coming up for next year. The key as it was this year, will on how much growth the Wildcats can make defensively and on the mound.
“Good ball teams can win games when they don’t hit good,” Graves said. “They can win games 3-2 or 4-3, those low-scoring games, because they’re so good defensively with their pitching, and we can’t do that right now. We’re going to put an emphasis on that next year and work toward being a better defensive team.”