Lonoke’s Dillon Fogle wasn’t sure what was going to happen in his first pitching performance in more than a year.
Now entering his second season as a punter at Southern Arkansas University, Fogle got his kicks on the mound Friday night in Lonoke’s first game of the Jim Hill Wood Bat Tournament at Taylor field.
“The first two or three innings I wasn’t feeling it,” Fogle said. “It took me a little while to get going. I left a couple of balls up that hurt me but I felt good. It just took me a while to get back in shape.”
After Lonoke scored a run in the top of the first to start the affair, Camden roared back in the bottom of the frame with three runs on three hits off Fogle. But the right-hander slowed the pace after that, blanking Camden for the next three innings before giving up two more runs in the fifth.
“I will be too old to play next year so I wanted to give it one more try,” Fogle said. “I would like to maybe even walk on up there next year. We’ll just have to see. I didn’t try out last year because I just wanted to go through the offseason in football.”
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Lonoke coach John Dawson is pleased with Fogle’s decision.
“Dillon pitching the whole game was really big for us,” Dawson said. “That is really going to help our pitching the rest of the tournament.”
Even with throwing 113 pitches in the complete-game effort, Fogle said at no point did he feel the need to exit the mound.
“I felt confident,” Fogle said. “After the first couple of innings I knew I had to do something different. My arm came alive after that. Now it just needs ice.”
Lonoke will play Hamburg at noon today at Eddie Bryan Field
“We are very familiar with Hamburg,” Dawson said. “They’ve got a group that we’ve been playing since this group was 11 or 12 years old. We seem to have their number during the regular season and they seem to have ours come tournament time. So it should be a very good game.”
In the late game at Taylor Field, Camden-16 beat PBNB-16, 10-7. At Eddie Bryan, the Pine Bluff Angels slipped past PBNB-16, 6-5, and Hamburg nipped Nashville 4-3.