Hillcats' Partch suffers through another rough outing

Bad pitching, bad luck, or a little bit of both? For the Hillcats’ Curtis Partch, it’s definitely a little of both. Mechanically, he said he feels fine, something Hillcats pitching coach Rigo Beltran echoes. But baseball is a numbers-driven sport, and the numbers for Partch of late are pretty ugly.

In his last three starts — 12 2/3 innings pitched, 34 hits, 19 earned runs for an ERA in that span of 13.50. In Wilmington’s 11-3 win over the Hillcats on Thursday, Partch allowed 11 hits and seven earned runs and recorded just seven outs.

And when the luck goes against you, it REALLY goes against you. Take Thursday’s second inning, when Partch allowed five consecutive hits. He did his job, which was to induce ground balls. Only the ground balls found gaps in the defense every time.

“I think at one point, I counted eight ground balls that found holes,” Beltran said. “He’s making pitches, and those are the things you can’t control.”

Wilmington, which entered the game hitting .251 as a team, had 17 hits by the end of the fifth inning and finished with 21, a season high for both the Blue Rocks and a Lynchburg opponent. The Blue Rocks got major contributions up and down the lineup. Sure, top prospects Wil Myers (4-for-5, 4 RBIs) and Eric Hosmer (2-for-5, RBI) performed.

But Wilmington also got two home runs from Adam Frost, who had homered twice this season in 127 at-bats between Low-A Burllington and Wilmington, and four hits from Adrian Ortiz, the No. 9 hitter.

It all added up to a seventh straight loss for the Hillcats, who will try to salvage one game of this six-game homestand tonight.

“Up until tonight, every game, we’ve been in,” Hillcats manager Pat Kelly said. “Tonight, we got blown out. That happens. We’ve played good, we just haven’t produced runs. It seems like we’re a streaky team. We’ll win three then we’ll lose a bunch.”

Kelly tried shaking up the lineup Thursday in an effort to spark a team that had scored four runs or fewer in six of its last seven games. Outfielder Josh Fellhauer moved back to the leadoff spot after spending some time in the middle of the lineup, dropping Cody Puckett to the No. 2 spot, where he’s hit .278 and drawn 23 walks this season.

Brodie Greene, who had been batting third, dropped to the No. 6 spot, and Felix Perez moved to the three hole. For an inning, at least, the changes worked. In the first, the Hillcats got two-out RBI hits from Carlos Mendez and Neftali Soto to take a brief 2-1 lead.

It fell apart in the second, as the Blue Rocks strung together hit after hit. In Partch’s last start against Winston-Salem, he allowed seven consecutive base hits before being pulled.

“Right now, he’s not catching the breaks,” Beltran said. “I know three outings ago he gave up four runs and they didn’t even hit the ball hard. Today, he got a couple of opportunities to get out of innings and balls kept finding the holes between first and second and short and third.

“You can’t control where the ball is going to go after you release it.”