The Quality Foods Parksville Royals travel to Nanaimo tonight to face the Pirates as the B.C. Premier Baseball League season heads into a busy home stretch.
With several rain-out makeup games mixed into the schedule, the Royals (7-30) are in the middle of a run of 13 games over the final 16 days of the regular season.
Parksville travels to Serauxmen Stadium for tonight’s 6:30 contest coming off a rough stretch of seven straight losses, which followed on the heels of a modest three-game winning streak the team put together in late June.
After tonight’s game, the Royals will immediately head to the lower mainland for a pair of games Wednesday against the league-leading North Shore Twins. Those games are a makeup of a doubleheader rained out on June 18.
Parksville then wraps up the regular season with back-to-back home doubleheaders this weekend, July 16-17. Saturday’s twinbill against the Whalley Chiefs of Surrey begins at 12:15 p.m. Sunday the Royals host Abbotsford beginning at 11 a.m.
Last Tuesday, the team traveled to Whalley Athletic Park in Surrey and was dispatched by the host Chiefs in an 8-1 and 12-0 doubleheader sweep.
Before the trip to Surrey, Parksville suffered a pair of much closer losses, 9-7 and 4-2, to the Victoria Mariners on Canada Day at Parksville’s Springwood Park. The day before that, they traveled to Coquitlam for another rain makeup, dropping a doubleheader to the Reds by scores of 6-3 and 3-2.
Reds 6, Royals 3
Parksville got all its scoring in the late stages of the opening game in their June 20 doubleheader in Coquitlam, after the Reds (16-19) put up six runs — just three of them earned — through the first five innings.
Zach Waddington and Jamie Roberts delivered RBI singles in the sixth inning after Thomas Green and Kieran Bowles led off the inning with back-to-back walks for the Royals. Parksville added another run in the seventh when Green’s single scored Ben Swing, and the Royals went on to load the bases with one out before Reds reliever Sam Lantela snuffed the rally with two straight strikeouts.
Ethan Christensen took the loss on the mound.
Reds 3, Royals 2
Parksville starter Alex McRae threw five shutout innings, but they came after Coquitlam put up three runs in the bottom of the first inning. That would prove to be just enough as another Royals rally fell just short in the closing game of the doubleheader.
Green’s RBI double in the third inning scored Aiden Brot, who had walked and stolen second base, and Green came around to score on a two-base error to draw the Royals to 3-2.
Parksville advanced runners into scoring position in the fourth and sixth innings, but were unable to push across the tying run as they suffered their seventh one-run loss of the season.
Chiefs 8, Royals 1
Whalley made the most of its eight hits in the opener of Tuesday’s doubleheader, scoring eight runs through the first five innings.
Kieran Bowles singled home Robbie Dhut for the Royals’ lone run, a third-inning score that briefly cut Parksville’s deficit to 3-1.
Chiefs 12, Royals 0
The Royals wrapped up the one-day road trip with an ugly, 12-0 loss to the Chiefs (21-15) in a game stopped in the fifth inning to the run-limit rule.
The hosts plated single runs in the first and second innings, then erupted for a 10-run third inning. The Royals, who managed just three hits in their five innings of at-bats, used four different pitchers in the loss.
—NEWS Staff
