By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
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PENNSAUKEN — You’ll have to forgive Egg Harbor Township’s Brody Grimes for being a bit nervous heading into Tuesday’s game at Pennsauken. The junior right-hander had all of 4 1/3 career innings pitched prior to the windy afternoon off Route 130, and a none-to-impressive 6.46 ERA.
And Eagles coach Bryan Carmichael was giving him the ball in the opening round of the 52nd Joe Hartmann Diamond Classic — a tournament that pits South Jersey’s best 32 teams against each other in four rounds of solid baseball during a two-week span.
Grimes battled a hip injury as a sophomore, and aggravated that injury late in the 2026 preseason in South Carolina. But, bolstered by an infusion of confidence from coach Carmichael — who has guided EHT to more than 200 wins in his career — Grimes ripped through a pretty good Indians lineup for five-plus innings, earning the first win of his career.
Pennsauken, the No. 14 seed in the tournament, cut a 4-0 deficit in half with a pair of runs in the bottom of the fifth, but 23rd-seeded EHT tacked on three more runs in the top of the sixth to cruise to a 7-2 victory, one that puts the Eagles into the tournament’s quarterfinal round on Saturday against Cherry Hill West, a team that annually is in the conversation among teams that can win the Diamond Classic.
“I had a couple of outings where it was one or two innings and I did well in those, so, finally, today I got the start. They told me yesterday and I was a little thrown off my feet, but I was happy to start,” said Grimes, who lowered his ERA to 3.62. “I felt great today. My off-speed pitches were working. I struggled a little bit when I got into deep counts, but other than that I was pretty dialed in.
“(The early lead) settled me down a lot. I came, I’m not going to lie, with a lot of nerves, but I was able to calm down.”
“He’s a kid who, when we were down in Myrtle Beach (in late March), had a really good outing. He was going to throw on our last day there because we liked the way he had thrown earlier in the week, and he ended up hurting himself in practice. It was an injury that he aggravated from the year before. So, finally he’s back,” Carmichael said. “He’s been patient, he’s a hard worker, he’s conscientious about everything. He’s a student of the game. He’s constantly asking me and our pitching coach questions. We gave him an opportunity a few weeks ago and he threw well, and this past Thursday he threw really well at Vineland. So it’s something that we, as a coaching staff, have been asking for — we’ve been looking for another guy. We feel pretty good about our Nos. 1 and 2, and we have a guy coming out of the bullpen behind them for conference games, but we’re looking for a No. 3 guy and a No. 4 guy. We’re at the part of the season where we are piling games up. We really needed him to step up today, and he did.”
Egg Harbor Township (12-6, 8-2 Cape-Atlantic League National) scored twice in the top of the first to take a 2-0 lead, then added on two more runs in the fourth on an RBI single to right by Jamie Gonzelez and an RBI groundout from senior Dylan Salsbery, who went 1-for-3 with two runs scored and three RBIs.
Pennsauken (11-4, 6-1 BCSL Patriot) got back into the game in the bottom of the fifth on an RBI single by Jeremey Bautista and another run that scored on an errant pickoff throw to third by Grimes — one of the few mistakes he made all day. He allowed just three hits and one earned run while striking out six, and Finneas Lamb nailed it down, not allowing a hit or a run in the final inning-and-two-thirds. Salsbery added a huge two-run single as part of a three-run top of the sixth that sealed things up for the Eagles.
“He’s battled injuries. Last year he was injured and we go to Myrtle Beach this year, he’s set to be the starter on our last day there, and he injured his hip base running. He was out for a couple of weeks but battled back, has been throwing bullpens with our pitching coach, and he’s going to have to be one of our guys heading into the playoffs,” Salsbery said. “I was confident that he was going to get the job done. I’m confident in our whole staff that they’re going to be ready and that we’ll be ready to hit.”
“The best thing he did was he threw strikes and that’s what we preach here. We tell kids they have to be able to pound the strike zone, and if you can’t, you’re going to be in trouble,” Carmichael said of Grimes. “The one guy who walked ended up scoring, but that’s what happens when you put traffic on the bases. There is no defense for a walk, but he did a good job with that today. He walked one guy and hit a guy, so he limited the amount of freebies. We try to win the freebie war and he did a good job of that.”
Chip Clooney was the only Eagles player with more than one hit, but the EHT offense peppered Pennsauken with eight hits and two walks, and stole an eye-popping nine bases while taking advantage of five Indians errors. Carmichael said he hopes the win over Pennsauken is a harbinger of things to come, and that a team that had gone 3-3 in its six games prior to Tuesday may be starting to hit its stride.
“Our small-ball game was pretty good today. We laid down some bunts, we stole bases. That’s one of the best things we do is we run the bases really well. We did a good job of putting the ball in play and keeping pressure on them. One of the things that gets lost in the box score is our will to battle in the batter’s box. We did a great job today fouling balls off, and the next thing you know we knocked their starter out in the fourth inning,” the coach said. “It’s interesting to watch these guys develop from the end of March until now. We’re getting better, and now we’re starting to put our philosophies into effect. We just have to keep doing what we did today — just keep going about our business, not try to do anything more than we did today. We don’t need heroes, we just need guys playing team baseball. That’s what it was today, good team baseball.”
Added Salsbery, “we’ve matured a lot. We’re a young group with not a lot of varsity guys returning, but now is a good time to get hot. We just have to dominate the routine play and eliminate mistakes. We know we’re going to hit, and our pitchers are going to do the job.”
WHAT’S NEXT: EHT travels to Buena on Wednesday at 4 p.m. Pennsauken hosts Cinnaminson on Saturday at 3:45 p.m.
