A mere 48 hours after suffering a heartbreaking 3-2 defeat to the Bellevue Wolverines baseball team, the Mercer Island Islanders got revenge against their biggest rival.
The Islanders pounded out 13 hits en route to a convincing 17-5 victory on a rainy, blustery April 10 afternoon at Bellevue High School in Bellevue. Mercer Island improved to 10-2 with the win and Bellevue dropped to 10-2. The Islanders scored a staggering nine runs in the top of the fifth inning. Bellevue head coach Chris McCormack said it just wasn’t his team’s day.
“It’s baseball. Sometimes things like this happen. We’ll just have to move forward and take it one day at a time. Unfortunately you never want it (loss) to happen like this but other than today we’ve been playing really good,” McCormack said. “You got to have a short memory and just come back ready to play in the next one because we are right back at it.”
The Wolverines finished the contest with eight hits in the loss.
Mercer Island right fielder George Pallis set the tone for the game with the bases loaded in the top of the third inning. Pallis blasted a three-run double to right center field, extending Mercer Island’s lead to 6-1. The Islanders tacked on two more runs later in the inning, lengthening their lead to 8-1.
“There was two strikes and I was trying to just slow everything down and hit it the other way. It was a fastball right over the middle. I went opposite field to right center with it. It was pretty sweet,” Pallis said.
Mercer Island scored nine of its 17 runs in the top of the fifth. Mercer Island head coach Dominic Woody was glad to see his team come out of the games with more confidence than they had in their previous matchup with Bellevue just two days prior.
“I felt like both teams were kind of waiting around like a prizefighter to see what was going to go on in the last game. We just had to come out here with a little bit of a better focus and we did. We’ll take the ‘W.’ We’re happy with that,” Woody said.
The Islanders and Wolverines are tied for first place in the Class 3A KingCo standings with an 8-2 record in KingCo action.
“If you look at the schedule, you play everybody three times, and with these guys being in first place before today’s game, obviously it was a really big ball game for us because if they won today, they would have the tiebreaker against us and things would had been out of our own hands,” Woody said. “We would like to be able to get in a position where if it does come down to the last time we see them (with league title on the line), that it would be at our park and we like our chances.”
Shaun Scott: 425-453-5045; sscott@bellevuereporter.com
