In any level of baseball from T-ball to the big leagues, a team can’t afford to give its opponent extra outs and expect to win.

That’s precisely what happened to the Oak Harbor/Coupeville AA American Legion team in Monday’s 6-1 loss to Arlington.

In addition to leaving too many runners stranded in scoring position, the Wildcats made five key errors that allowed Arlington to put runs on the board.

“I think in the first three innings we had a guy on third base and couldn’t score,” coach Jim Waller said. “We have to be able to get runs in those types of situa-

tions and that kind of set the tone for the game.”

Arlington scored its first run in the top of the second inning on a single and a pair of errors, and made the score 2-0 in the top of the third on a double by Tony Geist, an infield out, a walk and a double steal.

The Wildcats cut the lead in half with a run in the bottom of the third on a leadoff single by Chris Reilly and a one-out RBI double by Danny Lura, but that would be the only run to cross the plate.

Arlington made the score 4-1 in the top of the fourth on a hit batter, a sacrifice bunt, yet another error and a single.

“We made some mistakes tonight like throwing to the wrong base one time,” Waller said. “We’ve got to cut down on stuff like that, but that’s what we’re here to learn in the summer.”

Arlington pitcher Derek Grandenauer got stronger as the game progressed and recorded all six

of his strikeouts from the fourth inning on.

“Their kid kind of settled down

after the first few innings and started throwing his off-speed stuff for strikes,” Waller said. “Early in the game he was up and we were hitting the ball. Once he started throwing strikes, he gave our kids problems.”

Alex Evans was 2-for-3 for the Wildcats and Reilly was 2-for-4.