Thursday, July 24, 1997

Crickets cruise to win

By AL PICKETT / Abilene Reporter-News

By the time Greg Bicknell took a seat, his Lubbock Cricket teammates had the game well in hand.

Bicknell, one of the Texas-Louisiana League's top pitchers with an 8-5 recordand a 3.99 earned run average, held the Abilene Prairie Dogs to no runs and just two hits in five innings of work.

Meanwhile, the Crickets staked Bicknell to a 9-0 lead en route to a 14-5 victory in front of 827 fans at Scott Field. Lubbock pounded out 21 hits againstthree Abilene pitchers.

Lubbock manager Glenn Sullivan said he took Bicknell out after the fifth justbecause he had thrown a lot of pitches and the Crickets had a big lead.

Lubbock did the damage with three runs in both the second and third innings off losing pitcher Royal Thomas (2-5).

Andy Skeels and Drue Sullivan hit back-to-back seeing-eye grounders for singles with two outs in the second. Mitch King then doubled into the left-fieldcorner to drive in both runs. Paul Petrulis followed with a RBI single.

The Crickets bunched together five more hits in the third inning. J.D. Ramirez drove in a run with a double, and Donald Harris and Sullivan had RBI singles.

Harris rapped an opposite-field two-run homer down the right-field line in the fifth inning, and the Crickets added an unearned in the sixth to increase their lead to 9-0.

The Dogs tried to make it interesting with five runs in the sixth inning. Jerod Hyde crushed a towering three-run homer, his second professional home run,over the left-field wall.

Later in the inning, T-L League batting leader Jason McClure, who went 2 for 4, doubled in Darryl Monroe and Scott Bethea to trim the deficit to 9-5.

But the Crickets put the game away with three runs in the top of the eighth inning off reliever Barry Takahashi. The big blow was Brad Gennaro's two-run double.

Mike Hardge added a two-run ninth-inning homer off George Preston Jr. for Lubbock.

The loss drops Abilene to 5-10 in the second half of the T-L League race.