Ordinarily the first two baseball games of the year in the first pre-season tournament wouldn't be the evening ending story in the middle of winter sports season. But perhaps never before in Carroll Baseball history has a season started as perfectly as today's did.
After a day's wait in the SBISD Varsity Baseball Tournament due to the torrential rain that has befallen the entire state this week, the Dragons actually got a game in at 10am this morning. With a plethora of returning starters in the pitching rotation to choose from, second year Carroll Head Coach Larry Vucan had a decision to make. Who would get the ball on opening day? Would it be junior TCU commit Cutter Sippel, senior 2-way man center fielder/pitcher Adam Stephenson or senior Nicco Cole? Call it intuition or just a coach's decision but Vucan chose Cole and that would prove to be a fateful nod.
The Carroll bats, um...did not exactly start out the season warm as the game with Stratford, in the reshuffled bracket, was scoreless through 5 innings. As the Stratford hurler keep putting up zeros, the pressure built on Nicco. All he did was match zero for zero and the classic pitcher's dual progressed.
The goose-egg battle was so tense you might not have noticed what was going on on the scoreboard. Glance at the hits and errors columns and a pair of zeros was there too. With the game hanging in the balance however , if there is such a thing as a quite no-hitter, Nicco was working on it. Until SLC finally broke through with three runs in the 6th inning sparked by a Stratford error, then a walk and a double by Yanluis Ortiz to give Carroll a 3-0 advantage. So by the time Nicco Cole returned to the mound for the home half of the 6th inning, everybody in the stadium knew what was going on. It was up to Nicco to finish it. He would strike out 12 Stratford hitters on the day and do all this on just 69 pitches. The opening day Perfecto would render SLC's first loss of the season later in the day inconsequential. They finished the day 1-1 but it will be Cole's date with history that all in attendance will remember. The Dragon offense tacked on five more runs in the 7th inning winning in perfect fashion 8-0.
The tournament does continue tomorrow at 10am when the team takes on CC Carroll and Houston Memorial at 12:30pm.