Ryan Rayburn
The way Saturday afternoon’s baseball game started out, Columbus North was on its way to getting run-ruled by Noblesville.
But after falling behind 6-0 in the second inning, the Bull Dogs staged a comeback. They rallied to send the game into extra innings before the Class 4A No. 4 Millers scored four times in the eighth to escape with an 11-7 victory.
“We didn’t lay over,” North coach Mike Bodart said. “We’re really starting to show that level of grit that we’re not going to just roll over. Teams are going to have to play us a full seven, or in this case, eight innings. We’re not going to give anything away even if we give them some runs early on.”
After scoring an unearned run in the first, Noblesville (11-3) plated five runs in the second off Bull Dog starter Conner Hensley. North (6-6) got on the board with two runs in the bottom of the second on a two-run single by Kyler Hashman.
After the Millers scored another unearned run off reliever Ryan Rayburn in the third to take a 7-2 lead, the Bull Dogs scored single runs in the third and fourth on sacrifice flies by Hensley and Hashman.
North then added two runs in the fourth on RBI-singles by Blake Osbourne and Rayburn to cut it to 7-6. An RBI-single by Hensley in the sixth tied the game.
Meanwhile, Rayburn shut down Noblesville from the third-through-sixth innings, allowing no hits and one unearned run in four innings.
“That was real huge for Ryan to come in and give us a successful four innings,” Bodart said. “He was just real efficient and real gutsy. Truthfully, the game was starting to get out of hand, and then he kind of came in and calmed it down. We got a run here and a run there, and we kept chipping away at it.”
Joey Fry came on and kept the Millers off the board in the seventh, but after the Bull Dogs went 1-2-3 in the bottom of the seventh, Noblesville scored four runs on five hits in the top of the eighth.
Hensley finished 2 for 4 with two RBIs, and Dillon James went 2 for 4 for North. Hashman had three RBIs.
The Bull Dogs had a three-game winning streak snapped. They were scheduled to play Floyd Central on Friday, but that game was rained out and will not be made up.
“We’ve really over the past week since the Silver Creek game started to understand what we’re supposed to do and are showing some desire and some grit,” Bodart said. “You hate losing games, period, and they’re miserable that we lost because they felt like it right there in our grasp. I’m not a big moral victory person, but we had double-digit hits, and we’re minimizing our strikeouts. So we’re really showing some growth, and our trajectory is really on a good path.”
