St. Michael’s bats in its sixth softball win

St. Michael’s softball team continued to pound the ball, rolling past winless Hot Springs Thursday, 20-5, in the Moriarty Invitational and will meet up this afternoon with the host Pintos at 3 o’clock.

After plating four runs each in the first two innings, the Lady Horsemen upped their overall record to 5-1 by scoring a dozen runs in the third frame and that’s as far as the game went as the run-rule was applied. St. Michael’s pieced together 14 hits and committed one error, while Hot Springs lost for the 10th time and managed but one hit while coming up with six miscues. It scored once in the opening inning and four times in the second.

It was another good day at bat for Lady Horsemen 8th-grader Marcella Ruiz as she went 3-for-3 and drove in four runs while scoring the same number of runs. Senior Mariah Valdez did the same in coming away with three hits in three at-bats, crossing the plate four times and batting home a pair of runs. Moriarty is 2-6 and lost a 12-9 game at St. Michael’s earlier this season. The Lady Horsemen are currently ranked first in 3A.

In another non-district game, Santa Fe Indian School dropped to 5-3 by visiting Albuquerque La Cueva and returning with an 8-0 setback as La Cueva scored once in the first, three times in the fourth, once more in the fifth, and three times in the last of the seventh.