Chillicothe defeats Adena in walk-off for first win of season

CHILLICOTHE − All Coen Butler needed was a hit.

The junior stared down Adena pitcher David Magill as he waited during his final at-bat on Wednesday night. Aiden Spaulding waited on third base to send Chillicothe home with a win. Ayden Hutchison had tied the game in the previous at-bat with a sacrifice fly. All Butler needed was another hit to keep the game from running into extra innings.

He didn't hesitate. On the first pitch, Butler hit a single into shallow left field. As he rushed toward first base, he turned around to watch Spaulding slide into home plate. Butler whirled around, pumped his arm as he stepped onto first base and immediately ran to join the mob of Cavaliers celebrating on the first base line. With Butler's RBI single, Chillicothe walked off with a 6-5 win over Adena at VA Memorial Stadium.

"I've got to really get this hit, I really have to," Butler said. "These last two games, we've only had two hits out of two games, and that's awful. That's the whole team, that's everyone as a team. We need to hit better, and we did tonight. That felt really good, and it felt really good to get that final hit for that walk-off win."

Butler had already churned out big hits for the Cavaliers in his previous plate appearances. The junior went 3-for-4 at the plate with four RBIs on Wednesday. His first RBI of the night came in the first inning, after he notched a single to score Hutchison and bring the Cavaliers up to a 1-1 tie with the Warriors. His two-run, inside-the-park home run in the bottom of the fifth erased a two-run deficit that the Cavaliers had stared down as they entered the inning.

Butler and the Cavaliers weren't limited by the slow hitting that hampered them in previous games. The Cavaliers racked up 10 hits on Wednesday, but the Warriors didn't let them off easy. Magill hounded the Cavaliers all night from the mound. He pitched for Adena throughout the entire game, logging seven strikeouts and taking the Cavaliers down in order during the second and fourth innings. The only inning in which the Cavaliers logged more than two hits in a row was during the first inning.

"David is by far our ace," Adena coach Seth McGuire said. "Most guys aren't going to be able to go out and throw as many pitches as he would early on in the season. But the work that he's put in in the offseason allows him to do that. He threw very well, he has a very good curveball-changeup mix."

While Magill whittled away on the mound, the Warriors pieced at-bats together and took advantage of three errors by the Cavaliers to stack runners on base. Magill, Austin Magill, Mason Dyer and Christian Heath all batted in a run on Wednesday, and Heath led the Warriors at the plate after going 2-for-3 on the night.

But Chillicothe found its stride. Butler served as a buoy and floated Chillicothe within reach of its first win of the season. Mason Brown tacked on another RBI single in the bottom of the third inning, and Hutchison picked up his own RBI after the sacrifice fly that set up Butler's walk-off single.

"That's the mentality we want to have every pitch, get better every inning," Chillicothe coach Tom Barr said. "That's what we want to do, really chip away every inning if we get ourselves in a hole. I think we saw that tonight out of the group. It's good to see that out of a nice, young ball group."

The Cavaliers struggled to find a solid offensive rhythm through their first two games, but they found structure on Wednesday. Their bats opened up, and runs followed. Now, they've notched their first win of the season and have a strong offensive outing to their name.

All it took was one final hit to get over the hump.

This article originally appeared on Chillicothe Gazette: Chillicothe defeats Adena in walk-off for first win of season