Carroll baseball team hot entering playoffs

The Carroll baseball team is hot.

The Dragons are storming into the postseason on a 10-game win streak, and coach Larry Hughes said he is confident his team is capable of making a good playoff run.

Carroll opens up the postseason at 7 p.m. Friday at Mansfield High School, and Hughes said he expects a good series from the Tigers.

“They’ve got a good baseball tradition,” Hughes said. “They always play teams very tough. We are going to be very similar. We actually played them in the Arlington Martin tournament earlier in the season and tied 3-3 ... so they have some good kids.

“We will have to pitch well and play a good game. We’ve got to score five or six runs in the playoffs, because I think we’re going to get good pitching and defense.”

Carroll swept L.D. Bell last week to wrap up the regular season, and even though the games were not played on their originally scheduled dates due to inclement weather, the Dragons still got the job done.

“Jason Small pitched for us in the first game,” Hughes said. “We played it on Monday because of the bad weather forecast for Tuesday. ... Jason Small pitched a great game. We won 6-1. We started kind of slow, but then scored most of our runs to separate the game in the fifth and sixth inning.

“We played the second game on Saturday. Kole Ramage pitched for us, and it was the same sort of thing. We scored our runs in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings.”

Hughes said believes the district did a good job of preparing his team for the level of competition it will see in the postseason.

“We’ve had some real close games,” Hughes said. “Some of that we brought on ourselves, because we just haven’t scored that many runs. We just hadn’t figured it out, but I think (because of) the tougher competition we’ve faced in the games we’ve played, we’re well prepared. We’ve won 10 games in a row going into the playoffs, so we’ve been playing good baseball. We’re less than one error per game on average for the year and in district, and that’s pretty good.”

Carroll wrapped up the regular season with a 19-6 record. Of the six games they lost, five were by one run.

This story was originally published May 3, 2016 at 1:56 PM with the headline "Carroll baseball team hot entering playoffs."