My fourth baseball article

Error costs Knights a chance at quarterfinals

• By Chris Drummond Tribune Sports Correspondent

• May 7, 2021

WOODSTOCK — East Paulding took advantage of a seventh-inning error to score two runs and beat River Ridge 6-4 on Thursday in Game 3 of a second-round Class AAAAAA playoff series.

The brought the Knights’ season to an end at 27-7, while the Raiders (26-9) moved on to the state quarterfinals where and will travel to Houston County next week.

“Super proud of the guys, as I told them,” River Ridge coach Scott Bradley said. “We won ourselves a region championship this year with this class. We hosted two rounds of playoff baseball and went to Game 3. We just didn’t make enough plays to win, but that’s baseball.”

The game also brought Bradley’s tenure as a coach at River Ridge to an end after 12 years, as he is heading to Etowah to become an assistant principal. He is expected to help in finding a successor to guide the program he built into a perennial playoff contender, including taking the Knights to back-to-back state semifinals in 2017 and ‘18, and a quarterfinal appearance in 2019.

Unfortunately, a return to the quarterfinals and beyond in 2021 turned out to not be in the making.

River Ridge scored first on Jordan Robinson’s sacrifice fly for a 1-0 lead.

East Paulding responded with three runs in the third inning. Trent Reddick gave the Raiders the lead with a two-run double, and Peyton Gentry expanded the lead with an RBI single. The lead grew to 4-1 when East Paulding added a run on a wild pitch in the fourth.

River Ridge began its comeback with an RBI single from Dylan Herrick to make it a 4-2 game, and Taylor Harris followed with a two-run double to tie the game.