By Hannah Walker —
The No. 2 Cardinals’ baseball team did a clean sweep over the weekend during their season’s opening match against Bellarmine’s Knights. The Cardinals were able to win the first game of the season, on Feb. 20 with a final score of 5 to 1.
At the beginning of the game, U of L senior Glenn Albanese was the right-handed pitcher for the first inning. Albanese is known for pitching scoreless innings against Kentucky, Cincinnati and Alabama and he was successively able to strike out the first player up to bat on the Knights.
He continued this killer pitching while facing 18 batters throughout the first four innings. By the end of the game, he had successively made 50 out of the 92 pitches in the game and had 5.0 out of 9.0 innings pitched. Overall, this was a strong win for Albanese on his first day back on the field.
Another player in the spotlight that evening was in fielder/outfielder junior Cameron Masterman, who made another stunning appearance for the beginning of his U of L season when he hit a clear homerun during the second inning.
“There’s nothing like the feeling of hitting a homerun,” Masterman said in a post-game interview. “It is always rewarding when you and your teammate are able to hit homeruns back to back and set high goals for future games.”
After the excitement throughout the first two innings, the game slowly calmed down during the third inning when no points were made by the players. Nonetheless, by the fourth inning, U of L’s junior outfielder, Luke Brown, advanced to second base, U of L’s junior outfielder, Trey Leonard, advanced to third, and Louisville made another point for a score of 1-5 by the fourth inning.
Louisville went on to beat the Knights in both of their matches the following day giving the Cardinals a strong start to the 2021 season.
File Photo // The Louisville Cardinal
