When Rapid City Stevens opened the second game of Monday's doubleheader with three first-inning runs, it seemed the Raiders were on the verge of stealing back some of the momentum Mitchell had built with Brett Young's strong pitching performance in a 7-0 Game 1 victory.
But with one swing of the bat, Mitchell's Jordan Piper changed all that.
Piper, the Kernels' senior first baseman, belted a three-run homer in the bottom of the inning, giving Mitchell a 4-3 lead and sending the Kernels on their way to a 14-4 win and a sweep of the Raiders Monday at Drake Field.
"It was a 3-2 pitch with two outs, and I was sitting fastball," Piper said. "He threw me a curveball down and in, and I just got the barrel on it."
After Young threw six innings of one-hit, shutout baseball in the Kernels' 7-0 win in the opener, the young Raiders seemed to be building confidence in Game 2 with three runs off Cade Hearnen in the top of the first, thanks in large part to Brennan Holloway's two-run single.
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But in the bottom of the inning, an RBI single from Young, two Rapid City errors and Piper's blast to left field forced the Raiders to play from behind once again.
"That's how quickly baseball momentum can change," Rapid City Stevens coach Joe Burmeister said.
Back-to-back triples from Hearnen and Sean DeVries and an RBI single from Kendall Patrick keyed a three-run second for Mitchell as the Kernels began to pull away. Mitchell broke the game wide open in the fourth with six more runs before ending the game via the 10-run rule in the fifth when Alex Bennett scored on a wild pitch.
Rapid City Stevens -- which features nine new starters this season -- also made two costly errors in Mitchell's fourth-inning outburst. The big blows for Mitchell in that inning were a two-run single for Piper and a two-run double for Hearnen.
Piper finished the second game 2-for-3 with five RBIs, and he had six RBIs on the day.
"He did a really good job of hitting early in the year last year, too," Mitchell coach Luke Norden said. "It doesn't take him long to get going and get in the swing of things."
DeVries was also 2-for-3 for Mitchell with three runs and an RBI and Hearnen was 2-for-4 with two RBIs. Dan Bareis was 2-for-3 to lead Rapid City. Dan Thyren was tagged with the loss while Hearnen got the win for Mitchell.
Mitchell's bats were the story in Game 2, but Young's arm led the Kernels in the opener. Young worked the first six innings before giving way to Piper in the seventh, and allowed only a second-inning single and a pair of walks while striking out eight.
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"That kid is a great pitcher," Burmeister said. "We saw him three out of the four times we played them last year. He's just got a great arm, he keeps the ball low and he doesn't fall behind in the count very often."
Mitchell's bats weren't especially hot in Game 1, but the Kernels did make Rapid City pay for four errors and six walks issued by their pitchers. In Stevens' 10.1 defensive innings in the two games combined, the Raiders issued 15 walks and committed eight errors. Burmeister said his team might have been hurt more than others by the recent lack of outdoor practice time, since his team is younger and more inexperienced than most teams, especially Mitchell, which returns all but one starter.
"I was hoping at this point to have a little more pitching experience, and a little more in-game experience," Burmeister said. "Because, quite frankly, to play Mitchell, we were going to need it. They're one of the best teams, if not the best team, in the state."
Mitchell finished with six hits from six different players in the Game 1 win, and the five through nine hitters in the lineup all drove in a run. That included back-to-back RBI singles from Nick Young and Steve Jackson in the second inning, which gave Mitchell a 3-0 lead, and Ryan Buck's RBI single as part of a two-run second inning.
Patrick also had an RBI double in the fourth and Alex Loes had an RBI single in the sixth.
"I was really happy with our at-bats," Norden said. "The bottom half did a really good job of looking relaxed, and some of those newer guys were taking good swings. Whether they got a hit or not, they were putting good swings on it, and did what they were supposed to do."
