WINDSOR – There’s no place like home.

After being outscored in their first two baseball games of the season, 23-to-1, Bertie played their first game in Windsor Friday evening and found some offense.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t muster enough of it as they fell to Plymouth 14-3 in a non-conference matchup.

Justin Byrum went 2-for-3 and drove in a run while Joseph Eure was 2-for-3 with a double and a run scored. Matt Hoggard and David Brown were 1-for-3 and scored the other Falcons runs between them.

Plymouth banged out 16 hits, but the predominately youthful Falcons hurt themselves mainly with miscues on defense.  They are also still developing their pitching, but offensively they swing the bats well.

“Early in the ball game we made some defensive mistakes and that hurt us,” said Bertie coach Randy Whitaker. “But I’ve got some kids who are trying to buy into what we’re doing and if I can get some of the others to straighten some things out and work hard then they can help us.”

Plymouth opened the scoring with four runs in the top of the first inning after stringing together three base hits, a hit batsman and a double.

The Vikings added four more in the third and another in the fourth for a 9-0 lead before Bertie’s bats began to heat up.

Eure opened the inning with a solid single through the infield.  He later went to second base on a passed ball to set up the Falcons’ first runner in scoring position.

Hoggard followed by driving in the first run of the game with a base hit to left field that scored Eure to get Bertie on the scoreboard. Hoggard took second base on the throw to the plate that Eure beat out.

One out later, Hoggard moved to third on Brown’s single. Hoggard would later score on a passed ball for the Falcons’ second run.

Devonta Holley followed and drew a base-on-balls.  Meanwhile, Brown stole third and came home with Bertie’s final run of the game on Byrum’s single into shallow left field.

The Falcons had a chance to score more and get back into the game, but Plymouth pitching shut down the threat.

Bertie got runners in scoring position with no one out in the bottom of the fifth, but could not bring them around.

Plymouth got five more runs over the next three innings and Bertie’s last scoring chance came in the bottom of the seventh with a runner on third, but again the Falcons (0-3) came up empty.

“We hit the ball better today than what we had all week,” said Whitaker. “We’re just a work-in-progress right now, but the kids are working hard and we try to get better every day.

“We don’t have a lot of pitching right now,” he added, “and a lot of teams know it, so we’ve got to go out there and play defense, because if we don’t it’s going to make it a long season.”