NORTH BERWICK – Mercy rule games are pretty frequent at the high school level. The disparity between teams in terms of talent fluctuates widely from year to year, and every so often you get a game where one side hangs a dozen or so runs on the other, ending the game early.

But you don’t often see an outright bludgeoning like what the Westbrook baseball team dished out at Noble on Tuesday.

Westbrook (2-0) was in control of the game right from the outset – particularly with ace senior Sean Murphy on the mound – with a 4-0 lead by the end of the first. They were beginning to calmly eye the mercy rule by the end of the second. Then, they went off. The Blazes scored seven runs in the top of the third alone, and hung nine more over two innings on the feckless Noble (1-1) pitching staff for a 23-0 victory.

“When you play a team on paper where you are supposed to win, you have got to put up a four or a five spot early,” said Westbrook Head Coach Mike Rutherford. “And last year we didn’t do that. Last year we played the teams that we were supposed to beat on paper 1-0, 4-3. If you get four runs in the first inning, with Murphy pitching, the game is probably over there. So then you can just relax and play baseball. If it’s 2-0 in the fifth inning, anything can happen. So the games you are supposed to win on paper, you win early. And we did.”

Westbrook was led by senior Zach Collett, who had eight RBIs, a home run, and only missed out on the cycle because Rutherford truncated what would have been Collett’s cycle-sealing triple into a double in the fifth. Murphy was equally effective with the bat as he was working from the mound – adding four RBIs, including a home run. In five innings pitched, Murphy struck out four, allowed just one hit and just a single base runner.

“When I first came into pitchers and catchers (earlier this spring), I still had a bit of a hitch,” Murphy said. “And I had a bit of a hitch today. But I went out and worked on it during one of those long innings. And so the last two innings I felt pretty fine; pretty smooth.”

“Sean pitched great,” Rutherford added, as he talked about Murphy’s return after losing last season to elbow surgery. “This is his first real game in two years. He didn’t pitch last summer or last spring, so this is his first real start.”

Once the Blazes were firmly in command, Rutherford did everything he could to avoid running up the score – inserting most of his bench, telling runners to only take one base (or no bases at all) on passed balls and things of that nature. It didn’t do a lot of good, as Westbrook couldn’t help but advance thanks to frequent fielding errors and walks given up by the Knights.

“I think that we didn’t start off by helping our pitchers out,” said Noble Head Coach Adam Hale. “We had some fly balls that we could have caught to get out of some innings a bit earlier than we did, and when you get behind 12 or 15 to nothing, it kind of falls apart after that. In those first two innings, if we could have given up like five instead of 10, that would have helped.”

Any possibility of a tight game evaporated quickly. Noble starting pitcher Nicholas Bickford forced Westbrook leadoff batter Joe Quinlan to ground out to start the first, but Kyle Heath singled and then Noble left fielder Forest Holmes dropped a routine fly ball by DH Scott Heath that left runners at first and second. Next up was Collett, who crushed the first pitch he saw to the wall in left field, bringing in both runners. Murphy then brought Collett home with a single, and later came home himself on a triple to center by Zach Gardiner that made it 4-0.

“Yesterday (when we beat Windham 3-0) the kid pitched a great game, but we were just one hit away from making it 7-0 or 8-0,” Murphy said. “I think we struck out with the bases loaded twice. But today we just got it done. That was what we wanted to do. We haven’t put up a 20 spot since junior high.”

The Knights went down in order – as they would most of the game – in the bottom half of the inning, and in the blink of the eye there were the Blazes at bat again, pouring on the runs. Westbrook went up 5-0 on a passed ball that brought Quinlan in, then made it 7-0 when Collett hammered a two-run shot over the 380-foot marker in dead center field.

Westbrook batted around in and then some in the third, and were up 14-0 by the time the dust settled. It was 19-0 by the end of four, and 21-0 when Murphy – perhaps fittingly – ended the scoring surge with a two-run shot of his own in the fifth.

“It was a good win for the team,” Collett said. “We really needed something like this – a big explosion – to get everybody’s confidence up. (I think we’re definitely starting to send a message to the league) with the two pitching performances we’ve had – both Scott (Heath) and Sean have both pitched great – and with our bats are starting to come alive. We haven’t had many errors; none yesterday, just one today, so you’ve got to be happy about that.”