Jeremy Charles goes the distance, Cats snap four-game slide

A seven-hitter by Jeremy Charles and a little patience at the plate was all the Thunder Bay Border Cats needed to snap a four-game losing skid.

Charles went the distance Wednesday night at Tbaytel Park at Port Arthur Stadium and the Cats notched runs on a bases loaded walk in the second and a bases loaded hit by pitch in the third to score a 2-1 win over the Rochester Honkers in front of 806 fans, despite only collecting four hits all night.

“It feels awesome,” said Charles, who improved to 5-1 on the season and could make a good case for an all-star nod, with a 2.34 earned run average in eight starts this summer.

“We’ve been getting some good starts out of our pitchers. Our hitters just haven’t been able to come through. I feel like today we all clicked as a team. I threw the ball well, the hitters put some good swings on the ball. We only got two runs, but the at bats were better so we got things going in the right direction.”

For one thing, the Border Cats managed to cut down their strikeouts at the plate. The Northwoods league team has regularly found itself in double digits in the dubious category, struggling to score runs as a result.

That number dropped to just four against the Honkers, the second seed in the North Division.

Making that an everyday occurrence is manager Danny Benedetti’s next goal.

“We’re climbing mountains now,” Benedetti said. “Our guys are seeing the ball better. We’re jumping fastballs better than we were before and now we’re not swinging on bad pitches. And now we happened to be on the other end of it, where they walked in runs instead of us walking guys in.

“We didn’t get the knock to just bury them, which we still need to work on, but we’re right there.”

The scoring, by both teams, was over by the bottom of the third.

After opening the second inning with an out, Honkers starter Tyler Feyereisen struggled with his controls, walking three straight batters.
One out later – a Matt Batten strikeout – he walked Jared James with no place to put him, scoring Mikael Mogues from third.

Charles made one of his few mistakes in the top of the third, hanging a pitch that Matt Fiedler crushed over the scoreboard in left, tying the game 1-1.

But with the bases loaded in the bottom half of the inning and Wyatt Shackleford on in relief, newcomer Max Dutto took one for the team, his hit by pitch forcing home Carter McEachern with what proved to be the winning run.

Charles shut the Honkers down from there, Rochester’s best chance to tie things up coming in the eighth, when Ryan Webberley drove the ball deep to centre, but was stymied by a sliding Alan Baldwin catch that stranded Alex Schultz on second.

Benedetti had nothing but praise for his starter.

“He was on. He threw 107 pitches today. But he’s always on. He’s one of our go-to guys.”

Though the team is just 5-10 in second half play, the first-year manager is still holding out hope for better things, with Charles, all-star Greg Weissert and Johnny York leading the way on the mound.

“We can make a playoff run here if we just continue to do what we’re doing,” he said.

The Cats and Weissert welcome the Waterloo Bucks to town on Thursday.