WINLOCK — The spoils were split Saturday in Egg Town in a doubleheader between Winlock and Ilwaco that featured a pair of run-shortened games, as the Cardinals took down the Fishermen 16-6 in Game 1 before the visitors got revenge with a 14-4 victory in Game 2.
“We just kind of went to sleep offensively," said first-year Winlock coach Lauren Dumoulin. "I think we felt pretty confident after Game 1, and kind of ran out of gas Game 2."
That confidence in the first game came from an offense that took its time to wake up, but stayed rolling once it got warmed up.
Winlock went down quietly in the first two innings and Ilwaco took a 2-0 lead into the middle of the third. Two Cardinal runs tied the game up at 2-2, and from there, the offense was humming for Winlock.
The Cardinals put together five hits in the bottom of the fourth — including three doubles — to plate five runs and take their first lead of the day. After scoring another run in the fourth, Winlock went into the bottom of the sixth inning up 8-6.
Addison Hall started off the sixth with a single — she went 3-for-3 with a walk in the game — and kicked off a run of nine straight Cardinals to reach base. The first eight of them came around to score, the last of which came home on a Tianna Bornstein-Cook single to give Winlock a 10-run cushion that served to end the game right then and there.
Hall, Bornstein-Cook, Maia Chaney, Natasha Patton, Kindyl Kelly, and Madison Rohman all had multi-hit games for Winlock. The Cardinals also saw some fresh faces make their debuts in the hit column, with Kyndra Forler and Charlee Connelly getting their first hits.
“Top-to-bottom, our lineup was really productive in the first game,” Dumoulin said.
Jordyn Taft led the Fishermen in Game 1, going 2-for-3 with a double and a pair of runs scored.
Once play resumed for Game 2 after a brief break — with Winlock this time agreeing to play the part of the away team and bat first — the two sides started off on opposite trajectories.
The Fishermen had kept an ace up their sleeve all Game 1, and brought out eighth-grader Madeleine Wilkin, who pumped fastball after fastball past befuddled Winlock hitters.
“It was an adjustment for some of our batters,” Dumoulin said. “We managed to get a few hits here and there, we just weren’t able to put them together the way we had in the first game.”
Wilkin struck out two in the top of the first inning, then two more in the second, three in the third, and three in the fourth.
Meanwhile, Winlock — which has relied on Hall and Karlie Jones to handle the pitching duties all season — saw its two arms start to fade as the second game wore on. Dumoulin bounced back and forth between Hall and Jones starting in Game 1, switching them in and out of the circle to give them each a bit of a break and to keep the Ilwaco offense off-balance.
But in the second game, the Fishermen stopped being fooled, and a hard liner right back up the middle hit Jones and forced her out midway through the game.
With the game tied at 4-4 after three innings, Ilwaco went ahead and never looked back, scoring three in the fourth, one and fifth, and six in the sixth — walking off with a run-rule win much the same way the Cardinals had earlier in the day.
On top of her pitching, Wilkin went 2-for-3 at the plate with a double, a triple, and two runs scored. Olivia McKinstry added a triple right behind her, and at the top of the Ilwaco order Justyce Patana went 2-for-3 with a pair of runs of her own.
Winlock (4-4) is scheduled to face Wahkiakum in Cathlamet on Wednesday, while Ilwaco (5-7) will host Raymond-South Bend in a doubleheader on April 20.
