On May 6, the Hanover Hawks were virtually on top of the Richmond baseball world. They had just handed home-standing Lee-Davis a decisive 13-0 five inning loss to move to 13-0 on the season. Following the game, Confederate head coach Kenny Lewis deemed the Hawks in a completely different league than his squad.
  But on the following night Hanover began an unexpected and unprecedented slide that has left everyone in the region scratching their heads.

  When visiting Mills Godwin escaped Hanover with a 6-4 victory on May 7, it appeared the Hawks had not only lost their first game of the season but a substantial portion of the swagger that had carried them through their first 13 contests.

  Over their final seven regular season games, Hanover has a 3-4 record with no victories over a team with a winning record.

  Ten days after beating down Lee-Davis, Hanover lost at home to the Confederates 2-1 and what once looked like an easy cruise to regionals and beyond suddenly became a desperate situation for the Hawks.

  On Monday evening (following press deadlines), Hanover had fallen into a playoff situation with Atlee to determine the Capital District regular season champion and the automatic bid to the Central Region Tournament.

  Junior pitcher Chris Childress feels the Hawks have lost more than mere games. “I think that one loss to Godwin, we just stopped playing to win,” he said. “We lost our tenacity. We lost our will to win. It’s in there somewhere. We’ve just got to find a way to find it.”

  Diagnosing what is broken has been easy for head coach Charlie Dragum. “We’ve just stopped hitting basically,” he said. “We’ve stopped having good at-bats and we’ve stopped competing as far as I can tell.”

  Yet, even as the offense has tapered off, the Hawks pitching and defense remains solid. Playing at #1 Cosby last week, Hanover turned in a solid defensive performance, but fell 5-4 to the Titans because they could not generate timely hits.

  “Everything’s magnified when you’re not hitting,” Dragum said. “Early in the year we were swinging out bats on record pace for us. We had a great year going statistically and we were scoring a lot of runs.”

  As such, situational hitting was not as important at the time. Now as the Hawks are involved in close contests timely at-bats have proved costly. “Now when runs are scarce, to get a guy over and get him in is tough,” Dragum said. “I don’t know if we’re not in the right frame of mind as far as executing the job situationally? We’re up there trying to hit home runs or hit balls in the gaps when we should be working on moving the guy over?”

  As easy as it has been to diagnose the problem, a solution has been far from simple. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out,” Dragum said. “That’s what every conversation we’ve had over the last week has been about and we’ve tried a little of everything, so I don’t know.

  “We’ve talked about the ability to get in and fight,” he said. “Just really fight. Not worry so much about doing things pretty, just get in there and battling and having more of a warrior mentality than anything.”

  Childress agrees. “I think the big thing is we need to play with a little more heart,” he said. “Just finding a way to go out and punch somebody else in the mouth, take something personal for once.”

  Playing the Capital District Tournament on their home field could be just the cure that the Hawks are looking for. “That’s our field,” Childress said. “We practice there and when it comes down to a district tournament, we’re going to defend our house. Show people how Hanover really needs to play baseball.”