Late mistakes cost Hatboro-Horsham against CB South

warrington >> Tuesday’s Suburban One Continental Conference game between Hatboro-Horsham had all the signs of an early season game. Both teams played a game in the rain the day prior, although CB South’s contest with Abington lasted all of one inning, Tuesday was a bit drier but frigid temperatures and high winds posed different difficulties.
The only thing that didn’t have an early season feel to it was the play on the field. While Hatboro-Horsham made a couple of deadly mistakes in the latter stages of the game the was well played for team playing the first week of April.
An error by the Hatters in the top of the fifth inning was the play that altered the game. With one out and pair of runners on Taylor Marinelli cranked a three run homerun to left field, extending the Titans lead from one to four. CB South tacked on another run in the top of the seventh to preserve a 7-2.
“(Errors) came at inopportune times,” Hatboro-Horsham coach Jim DiFilippo said. “If you don’t play a clean game you’re not going to win and it wasn’t a clean game.”
Marinelli was one of the few hitters for CB South that seemed to have a read on Hatters pitcher Taylor Scuibba. Scuibba scattered six hits in her 4.2 innings of work with two hits coming from Marinelli.
In Marinelli’s first at bat she flew out deep to center field but earlier in the at bat ripped a couple of balls foul including one deep down the left field line. In her second at bat Marinelli blasted a hard hit single that drove in Lauren Nones.
“The pitch was right down the middle,” DiFilippo said. “You can try to pitch around a kid, we can call it to pitch around a kid, but (Marinelli) is a very good hitter.”
Offensively for the Hatters they had a couple of things working against them, mainly the Titans defense. One of the better and more impactful plays in the game came in the second inning.
With a 1-0 lead to start the inning leftfielder Kyleigh Dinnien got on base with a one-out single. The next batter Kaeli Simmons scorched a ball to left field, Dinnien trying to score from first was narrowly thrown out on a perfectly executed relay home and Simmons was thrown out at third as she was trying to stretch a double into a triple.
The other factor working against the Hatboro-Horsham offense was it couldn’t get a timely hit when it needed to have it. It was able to get runners and base and put the ball in play but the Hatters couldn’t adequately enough move and score runners.
“They walked six of our batters and none of them scored,” DiFilippo said. “Offensively it looked like they were asleep. When you’ve got three or four people making solid contact and the rest of the lineup isn’t making solid contact, it always seems to work its way around where the one that is making the contact doesn’t come up at the time you need the hit.”