Emery baseball in a battle for region

By Gary Arrington
Sports Writer

The Emery High baseball team is in the midst of a dogfight for the region crown as the regular season will come to a close this week. Gunnison Valley stands at 7-1 in region and leads the pack ahead of 6-2 Emery and 6-2 Grand. San Juan has a 5-3 record for the region season. As one can see, with just two games remaining for each team, this week’s games will determine the placement of the four teams in the 2-A Utah State baseball tournament that is right around the corner.
Emery will take on current leader Gunnison Valley twice this week, once at home and once on the road. The teams will be at Gunnison on Tuesday afternoon and then will play in Castle Dale Friday afternoon. Grand and San Juan also play this week. Last week Emery faced North Sevier twice and ended the week with a pair of region wins. On Tuesday the two teams played in Castle Dale and Emery prevailed 2-0 as Tel Gardner pitched the five-hit shutout. On Friday they faced off in Salina and Emery won again, this time by the score of 11-4 as the two teams pounded out 25 base hits throughout the game. Zach Jorgensen pitched six innings of this game and threw 109 pitches with 72 being strikes. Race Nielson pitched the final inning.
In the first game, Emery scored once in the third inning and once more in the sixth inning for their two runs. Those runs were scored by Jordan Baletka and Tel Gardner. Emery had just five hits in the game, with Gardner having two of those, one a single and one a double. Logan Labrum also hit a double and had an RBI and Colton Willson and Kyson Stilson each had singles. Stilson had the other RBI.
In the next game, Emery scored once in the third inning, once in the fifth inning and then nine times in the top of the seventh inning. The Wolves had scored three runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to grab the lead. North Sevier added a run in the bottom of the final inning to get to the final score.
Gardner and Jorgensen hit doubles in the game for the Spartans only extra base hits. Labrum and Nielsen each had three singles in this game with
Gardner adding two more as did Stilson. Koda Alton, Jorgensen and Willson also had a single.
Gunnison’s lone region loss came against Grand while Emery has lost to both Grand and San Juan. Grand has lost to Emery and Gunnison. This is an important week in region baseball.