JHS baseball splits first two games

The Johnston baseball team split its first two games of the regular season, beating Woonsocket 2-1 in the opener then falling to East Providence 1-0 in the second.
Emmanuel Rios got the win on the mound in the opener, pitching six innings and allowing no earned runs while striking out nine batters. Davian Nunez led the team at the plate, going 2-for-2 and knocking in both of its runs.
Dylan Guernon tossed a solid game against the Townies on Monday night, but their one run would be enough to get the win. Guernon pitched five innings, allowing no earned runs and striking out six. Johnston was held scoreless and Matt Clements earned two of the team’s four hits in the loss.
Although the Johnston pitching has been stellar through two games, the bats have struggled to take off. As the offense looks for answers, Johnston coach Joe Acciardo believes the pitching and defense will have to shoulder the load in the early going.
“We’ve got to play some small ball and we have to be disciplined. That’s something that we’re trying to focus on, getting back to the fundamentals and making it work. We just have to understand that we aren’t going to be a team that puts up big numbers across the plate, but we’ll have to get some runs somehow,” Acciardo said. “We won’t be able to make errors and we’ll have to generate runs anyway we can. It’s early, though, so it’s not like we can’t turn it around.”
Acciardo continued, “We’ll try to take a page out of East Providence’s book last year. They won 13 games by one run and that may be something that we have to do. It’s all about getting the little things done and having discipline, patience. When you’re playing small ball, you have to have unselfish players. No one wants to bunt, but sometimes you have to do (those things) to give the team the best chance to win. We just need to figure out how to generate runs. We can pitch, we can field. We can play with anyone as long as we play as a team and do the little things.”
The Panthers were scheduled to take on Ponaganset on Wednesday, but the results were not available at press time.