Huskies’ Aces Oust Wildcats

ALTOONA – The Central Mountain baseball team knew that the Mifflin County Huskies had not one but two pitching blue-chippers awaiting them in today’s District 6 AAAA championship contest.

And if you’re a Mifflin County fan, starter Peyton Reesman and reliever Isaiah Kearns did not disappoint. The two veteran pitchers combined on a 3-hitter, shutting down Central Mountain’s normally potent offense en route to a 6-2 win.

The Pitt-bound Reesman kept the Wildcats off balance through the first six innings, changing speeds while holding CM to three hits; West Virginia-bound Kearns came in and fired 90 to 92 mile per hour fastballs in a hitless final inning.

Meanwhile the Huskies would take advantage of a rare loss of control by Wildcat starter Alex Garbrick and put up three runs in the top of the first and assume a lead they would not relinquish. Garbrick, a Division I Morehead State recruit, walked three batters in the first inning and all of them scored; the big hit was a 2-RBI single from Tyler Powell.

The Wildcats answered with two in the bottom of the inning, using a walk to Garbrick, an RBI single from Talon Falls and an RBI double from Isaac Porter to put the score at 3-2 after one. But that was as close as the Wildcats would get, able to only pick up one more hit the rest of the game, a third inning single from Falls. The two Mifflin County pitchers did surrender a total of five walks but the Wildcats could not come up with a clutch hit.

The loss put the damper on an otherwise outstanding 19-3 season for Central Mountain. For Mifflin County  (16-6) the first-ever district title for the school means the Huskies move on to a PIAA play-in game against Erie McDowell, the contest to be played at Slippery Rock on Thursday.