After falling into the losers bracket with a loss to Virginia State on Friday, Salem bounced back with four straight wins on Saturday and Sunday to claim the New South Athletic Conference baseball title.

On Saturday, the Tigers slipped past Apprentice 5-4 and manhandled Mid-Atlantic Christian 17-2 to advance into Sunday’s finals, where they needed two wins over the host Trojans to take the trophy to West Virginia.

In Sunday’s game one, the Tigers opened up the scoring when Tyler Shinn had two RBI’s from a single and a sacrifice fly out bringing home Luis Angarita twice. Salem scored again in the 7th and 8th inning thanks to sacrificed fly outs from Angarita and Jacob Hurley which allowed Jose Lojo and Hayes Lightsey to score. In the 9th inning, five total runs were scored by a double from Hurley and a single from Aaron Forbes. This took the final score to 10-0 giving that Frankie Gulko and Tyler Salmons a scoreless game with 10 strikeouts between the two.

In the second game of the day, Virginia State came out of the gates strong scoring three runs in the 1st inning and two in the 2nd. Salem answered this by scoring three runs in the 3rd inning when Kaiden Zacharias doubled down the right field line earning 2 RBI’s and bringing home Angarita and Forbes. Shinn then singled up the middle scoring Zacharias. In the 8th inning the Tigers scored another three, Shinn ran home on an error, a sacrifice fly out from Forbes bought home Lightsey and Brett Ehr scored on a sacrificed bunt. In the last inning Ben Matos walked with the bases loaded, allowing Nathan Kuhn to score the walk off run and Salem the 7-6 win.

Congratulations, Salem Tigers!

Story and image courtesy salemtigers.com