Grizzaffi one walk away from perfect game as Chargers thump Thunderbirds

The Charger baseball team picked up two district wins this week after they swept Wagner.

Champion was on the road Thursday and toppled the Thunderbirds, 14-1, and before that, the Chargers shutout Wagner on Tuesday, 5-0, behind a near-perfect game from AJ Grizzaffi.

The Chargers are 21-7 overall and 10-4 in district. They’ll tangle with Tivy in two games this week.

For more on the 14-1 win, look in the Boerne Star.

Champion 5, Wagner 0

Charger pitcher AJ Grizzaffi flirted with perfection Tuesday when Champion hosted Wagner.

Grizzaffi walked the third batter he faced but then retired the next 19 batters in a row with the help of his defense.

A perfect game in high school consists of pitching to only 21 batters and Grizzaffi faced 22 on Tuesday after the one walk. He struck out 10 and didn’t give up a hit or run on 84 pitches to earn the win.

Even his coach Ben Woodchick was impressed.

“AJ threw one of the better high school games I’ve seen. Every district game has playoff implications in this league and AJ stepped up in a big way for his team,” Woodchick said. “He did a great job of being efficient, allowing him to register his first complete game, only throwing 84 pitches over seven innings. His defense made a couple of big plays behind him as well to seal the nearly perfect game.”

The Chargers gave Grizzaffi offensive support with 3 runs in the bottom of the third frame. Sam Miller and Owen Kuhl singled to start the inning and then Jaedyn Yamaguchi lined a double to center field to bring in courtesy runner Mark Thompson and Kuhl.

Yamaguchi moved to third on a Garland Whitehead sac bunt and later scored on a single from Aidan Smith and the Chargers were up 3-0.

Champion padded its lead with 2 runs in the bottom of the fifth. Yamaguchi reached on an error and his courtesy runner, Preston Dennis, scored on a Whitehead double.

Later in the inning, Smith singled again and brought in Whitehead and the lead was 5-0 and stayed there the rest of the way.

Whitehead, Yamaguchi and Kuhl all doubled in the game for the Chargers team that had 9 hits in the contest.

Kuhl also singled and scored a run, Yamaguchi collected 2 RBI and Aidan Smith hit 3 singles and picked up 2 RBI.