By JOHN BOHNENKAMP
David Theriot Jr., had such an easy night, the sun was still out when he threw his final pitch.
Theriot pitched a four-hit shutout, striking out eight, in the Burlington Bees’ 14-0 win over the Jackson Rockabillys in Thursday’s Prospect League game at Community Field.
Theriot needed just 87 pitches — 62 were for strikes — to get through the seven innings in a game shortened by the league’s 10-run rule. He walked just one, and only allowed three singles, with the only extra-base hit coming on Nick Varon’s two-out double in the seventh.
The game took just 1 hour, 53 minutes to play.
“That’s pretty nice,” Theriot said, smiling. “You can’t beat that.”
The Bees (7-7 second half) won their fourth consecutive home game. They were coming off Wednesday’s 9-8 win over Springfield in which they rallied from an 8-1 deficit in the fifth inning, and they added to the momentum with this win.
“I think it was a carryover from last night,” said coach Casey Sole, who was interim manager for the game as Owen Oreskovich was serving a one-game suspension after his ejection from Wednesday’s game. “We’re just playing together, figuring each other out. Just starting to really get in the groove.”
Theriot (3-2) reduced his earned run average to 2.42, a much better outing than the last time he worked, when he gave up 10 runs — five earned — in two innings in a 15-5 loss at Alton on July 12.
“Tonight was a lot better, a lot more fun,” Theriot said. “The last outing, I couldn’t get ahead. Whenever I would throw a strike, they would be on me. Tonight I was getting ahead, and I was staying low in the zone.”
It wasn’t a good first batter for Theriot on this night. Jackson’s Ethan Rossow hit a grounder to first baseman Kinnick Pusteoska for what looked to be the first out of the game, but Theriot dropped the throw from Pusteoska as he was covering first base.
Theriot then retired the next eight hitters before Rossow singled for the Rockabillys’ first hit of the game in the third inning.
“You can just feel sometimes whenever it’s going to be a good day,” Theriot said. “To be honest, I didn’t feel anything different really. But after the first couple of batters it was like, ‘Uh, this might be a little different of a rhythm tonight.’”
“It’s very easy catching him when he dominates the zone like that,” said catcher Nick Meyer. “Everything was working. Fastball, slider, mixing them up. Everything worked.”
“I thought he had a lot of movement on his pitches today,” Sole said. “Cut it, sink it, keep them off-balance. And he was able to get ahead in the counts, which was good. He had a lot of success.”
The Bees scored in every inning, taking advantage of two errors and seven walks from Jackson starter Matt Maloney in the first four innings.
Burlington had 10 hits. Meyer had three and Jeremy Figueroa, who drove in the winning run in Wednesday’s game, had two. Pusteoska drove in three runs, two on a fifth-inning home run.
“The vibes are pretty high in here right now,” Meyer said.
“The bats are completely different this half,” Theriot said. “We’ve got a lot of guys who can hit the ball.”
Photo: Bees starter David Theriot pitched a four-hit shutout on Thursday. (Steve Cirinna/Burlington Bees)
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