9th Region baseball semis: Strong pitching gets Beechwood, Ryle into finals

The stage is set for Thursday’s 9th Region baseball championship.

Beechwood will take on Ryle at 8 p.m. for the right to head down to Lexington and play in the state tournament.

Pitching has been the name of the game in the tournament and it was no different Tuesday night at Thomas More Stadium in Florence. The Tigers got a complete game from Caleb Arrasmith while Ryle got a near complete game from Nik Carter in their win over Dixie Heights.

Here’s how Tuesday’s action unfolded:

Ryle 5, Dixie Heights 1

Coach Coppola is what Ryle coach Joe Aylor calls him.

With his baseball smarts, Anthony Coppola can make a difference on a baseball field with his mind. His speed helps too.

Coppola collected two hits, stole two bases and scored two runs in the Raiders 5-1 victory over Dixie Heights in Tuesday’s 9th Region baseball tournament semifinals at Thomas More Stadium in Florence.

“He’s one of the smartest baseball players I’ve ever coached,” Aylor said. “He’s going Division I for a reason. He’s literally a second coach on the field for us. I like to call him Coach Coppola sometimes. He doesn’t think I’m serious, but you know his vision of the game is far beyond any senior that I’ve ever had the privilege of coaching and I’ve had some really good seniors come through the program. He just gets it.

Coppola said he had a read on Colonels pitcher Will Wilson, opening up the ability to steal bases. In a game where runs were at a premium, it made a difference.

“I realized after his first couple pick-offs, it was a little different than his delivery to home,” Coppola said. “His delivery to home was a little slower and I know my time to get to second, so I was able to get there.”

Nik Carter was one of the main reasons runs were at a premium. He delivered six strong innings and didn’t allow a base hit after the second. In a steady rain at times and a downpour later, control at times was an issue with three walks and three hit batters, but Carter found a way through it.

He finished his six innings with just three hits allowed and struck out six.

“”I was trying to get ahead,” Carter said. “It’s just next pitch, next pitch, next pitch. My fastball was working really well. I tried to execute that really well today.”

After a walked batter and hit by pitch to start off the bottom of the seventh, Aylor turned to AJ Davis to close things out and he did.

Dixie got on the board first with a run in the opening frame, Austin Krohmer’s double scoring Oliver Linstruth. The damage could have been more, but a groundout and Carter strikeout ended the threat.

After Coppola’s run in the third to tie it up at one, both teams missed opportunities the next couple of frames to break the deadlock.

Ryle came through in the fifth with a run after Coppola reached on a bunt single, was sacrificed over to second, stole third and scored on a Michael Flowers sac fly RBI, his fourth run driven in of the tournament as he’s now 5-for-6 in two games.

“Simple approach, hit it where they pitch it and put the bat on the ball,” Aylor said. “He’s not a guy that’s trying to hit one out every time, he’s just trying to make contact and see what happens. If we can keep that simple approach, we’re pretty dangerous.”

The Raiders delivered the knockout blow in the seventh as the steady downpour came. They collected three hits, walked twice and were hit by a pitch as they put three runs across for insurance.

Now they’ll go for their second region title in three years on Wednesday. They won’t have the services of their top two pitchers in Xaden Hughes and Carter due to pitch count limits, but the confidence is there regardless for the Raiders.

“We’re confident with whoever on the mound,” Coppola said. “We’re gonna back up our pitchers and then their job was just to pound the zone. Luckily, they did a really good job of that, and we were able to keep them in for so long, using only two or three pitchers. I think AJ is good to come back for the championship, too. So, I think we’re in a good spot.”

Dixie’s season comes to a close at 20-15, playing their best ball when it mattered most. They closed the season winning eight of their last nine games. Noah Cline and Will Wilson had the other two hits for the Colonels on the night. They had 12 runners reach base, but couldn’t find any more timely hits after the first.

Wilson took the loss on the mound, a solid outing of 5.1 innings, allowing four hits, two earned runs, walking five and striking out four.

Beechwood 6, Conner 1

One thing Conner won’t be doing is sending Caleb Arrasmith Christmas cards.

For the second straight season, Arrasmith played a big part in ending the Cougars season. Last year it was six innings of two-hit baseball in a 7-3 victory over Conner in the region semifinals. This year it was a complete game six-hitter as the Tigers took down the Cougars 6-1.

Arrasmith was in complete control, the lone Cougar run unearned and issued just one walk on the evening. He struck out five and needed 107 pitches to finish the game off.

“Coming off the last outing wasn’t amazing, but today I just felt 10 times better,” Arrasmith said. “Ball is just coming out the hand good and I mean a game like that, a team like they can swing it. They’re gonna swing it, they’re not gonna watch pitches, so you just hit the zone, try your best to hit the corners and hope to make them miss. Miss barrels and it worked.”

Seven of the nine Beechwood batters collected hits, one who didn’t is hitting .560 on the season in Tyler Fryman. Despite the junior star having a rare hitless game, the Tigers lineup got hits up and down the lineup.

The final score didn’t indicate how close this game was.

“This game tonight was a heavyweight fight,” Tigers coach Kevin Gray said. “Brady Bushman and Caleb Arrasmith, that was worth the price of admission if you ask me.”

It was 1-1 through three innings, both teams taking advantage of an error to score their first runs. The Tigers scratched a run across in the fourth on a Zach True RBI single to score Jackson Mando. The number 6-7 hitters in the lineup doing the damage.

” If our bottom of the lineup hits and gets on to our top, we’re hard to beat,” Gray said. “To go up two to one was huge. Because if they score to go up 2-1, it’s a totally different feel like if we’re down one, we only got three at-bats left. They may have felt a little pressure when we got that second run.”

Back to Ali vs Frazier. The Rumble in the Jungle. The Thrilla in Manilla.

Other than Beechwood threatening with the bases loaded on a two-out rally in the fifth, neither team really threatened the next couple of innings until the bottom of the sixth when Grayson Wagner collected his third hit of the day with a leadoff single.

He’d advance to third after two groundouts, putting the tying run 90-feet away. But Arrasmith got Cooper Kelly to strike out swinging to end the threat.

“Two-seam was running, just missing the barrel and then curveball was feeling pretty good today, too,” Arrasmith said.

The Tigers opened it up in the seventh as they doubled twice, Brooks Becker’s double scoring two runs and Beechwood added a couple more on a fielder’s choice RBI and an infield single.

“Before the game today I told my team, play for the man behind you or next to you,” Becker said. “At that moment, only people I could think about were my boys in the dugout and people on base. There was nothing there about me. Everything there was for my team.”

Beechwood will now play for their sixth region championship over the last seven seasons. They won four in a row from 2019-23 and look to get back on top after losing the region final to Highlands last season.

“We’re back at the same game we lost last year and most of the team remembers it last year. It hurt really bad,” Arrasmith said. “So we’re all gonna take pride in practice tomorrow and we’re gonna come ready to go come Thursday and give it our best shot for these seniors.”

Ryle is looking for their second region title in the last three years, winning in 2024 to snap a 11-year region title drought.

Conner was hopeful to get back to the region final for the first time since 2017, but came up short in the semis for the fourth straight year. Their season comes to a close at 23-14, rallying around each other and their group of eight seniors when adversity struck in late April with coach Mike Hart suspended from the team indefinitely. They went 8-5 from that point and won their most amount of games since the 2023 season.

PHOTOS: Slideshow provided by Charles Bolton

RYLE 5, DIXIE HEIGHTS 1

BEECHWOOD 6, CONNER 1