Bishop Guertin's Jake Boudreau deliivers a pitch in the second inning of Monday's game vs. Bedford at Holman Stadium. (Telegraph photo by TOM KING)

NASHUA – The Bishop Guertin High School baseball team this season was hoping to be all about pitching.

Well, it was on Monday, but not the way Cardinals coach Scott Painter envisioned in a 13-3 loss to old nemesis Bedford at Holman Stadium.

BG pitching surrendered 11 walks with three hit batsmen – including seven free passes in one inning — and that’s on the heels of issuing 11 walks in the season opener a day earlier vs. Windham. At least they escaped that with an 8-4 win.

“Eleven walks, three hit batters, pop flys dropped, ball in right field dropped, you can’t win high school games against good teams that way.”

The Bulldogs were in need of some charity, having lost a couple of tough ones to Keene and Pinkerton to start the year. They got some in the first inning in the form of a windblown infield pop that dropped in for a hit, and then Dom Tagliaferro sent a Jake Boudrea offering well over the left field brick wall to give Bedford a 2-0 lead. The ‘Dogs tacked on a run on a bases loaded walk in the second and three more in the fourth when Pat Foulis’s high liner couldn’t be corraled in right center for two runs. Danny Black’s sac fly made it 6-0, and that was Boudreau’s final inning. He was humming along last year before arm woes hit him at around mid-season, and BG was never the same. Save for a couple of brief preseaoson outings, this was his first serious outing.

“This his first real game action,” Painter said. “He was high. He didn’t like the strike zone, but Jeff (home plate umpire Kleiner) was consistent. We’ve got to adjust there.

“We’ve got to be better.”

“We come out here and I think our advantage was we’ve faced some tough pitching,” Bedford coach Billy Chapman said. “And Jake for BG, he’s a great pitcher. We needed a win today. We were ultra motivated to get that win.”

And Chapman’s starter, Foulis, was humming along until his pitch count got up in the 90s and the Cards were able to cut the lead in half. Jackson Goldstein delivered an RBI hit in the fifth, and two came in in the sixth on a Gavin Santos double and A.J. Holmes RBI ground out.

But the momentum of cutting things to 6-3 completely disappeared on Guertin in the seventh, thanks to the bullpen issuing seven walks and Carter Crauley smacking a two-run single in a seven-run frame. It wasn’t pretty.

Painter has to be concerned about his bullpen, which has walked 15 in the two games. The bright light was sophomore Ben Geiger, who tossed two scoreless.

“You need those guys to come out of the pen like Ben did today,” Painter said. “He thew 30 pitches in two innings. That’s what you need your bullpen guys to do. Come in, throw strikes, attack hitters, whether you’re up or down, you’ve got to come in and command the zone. We haven’t done that through two (games).”

Again, pitching depth was supposed to be BG’s strength.

“You would think,” Painter said. “But as we’ve told these guys and told everyone else in the state, if you don’t throw strikes, you can throw as hard as you want, be as good as you want, deep as you want, it doesn’t matter.”

Monday was Exhibit A. Or BB.

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