By Jeremy McDonald
Jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com
ROSEBURG, Ore.– The Corvallis Marketmen American Legion squad didn’t waste any time getting runs across the board to open up their Roseburg trip on Thursday afternoon.
In the second inning, the Marketmen loaded up the bases before drawing a bases loaded walk for their first run. Jaden Fifhause (West Albany) was the batter who drew the bases loaded walk. And the next batter, Blake Linton (West Albany) ripped a bases clearing triple that put the Marketmen ahead 4-0 and really got the momentum going for Corvallis. By the end of the inning, the Marketmen led 8-0 on Nelson.
“It was huge, it was nice to get going like that. I needed that for sure, I’ve been struggling a little bit. I’ve started to feel a little bit better and I started to improve on a lot of things,” Linton said. “Staying on the grind and keep working.”
And the bats, coming off their Area-3 sweep of the Mid-Coast Dungies and their game prior with the Hillsdale Merchants, continued to roll. The bats produced 13 runs in total on Thursday, Linton led the Marketmen with 4RBI’s and Ben Weiss (Corvallis) contributed another 3RBI’s in the victory. The Weiss-Linton duo led the team with two hits as well.
Those final five runs did come in through the clutch as well, as were their defense.
Nelson, motivated by Corvallis’ eight-run outburst, hung a three-run inning of their own that cut the Marketmen lead to 8-3 going into the bottom half of the inning. Andrew Street (Corvallis) came in during the fourth inning. The 2026 Spartan-grad pitched an inning-and-a-third of no-hit baseball while striking out three in the process to halt Nelson’s bats and gave his offense an opportunity to drive in those final five runs to end the game in five innings, 13-3.
“Definitely being in the strikezone and not letting them get any free bases and having a feel of my curveball as a secondary pitch was really, really helpful,” said Street. “It was really good to get those eight really, really early and set the tone for how the rest of the game was going to go, it was a good tone to set.”
Corvallis will play the Roseburg Doc Stewart’s on Friday night in Game 2 of the tournament as they’ll look to extend their winning streak to six games.
Photos By Jeremy McDonald
