PEARL – One of the great things about baseball is that, even on a bad day, you can usually enjoy a warm day in the sun.

On Saturday, the Warren Central Vikings didn’t even get to do that.

Dillon Walker went 3-for-4 with two RBIs, while Craig Howard had two hits and two RBIs and limited WC to three hits in four innings on the mound as Pearl hammered the Vikings 13-3 on a cold, windy day in Pearl.

The Vikings (5-20) committed seven errors that led to six runs, and was nearly as bad on the basepaths. They hit into three double plays – two on balls hit in the air – had one runner thrown out on a stolen base attempt and another picked off of first.

Adam Lee did have two hits for WC, and starting pitcher Keaton Sanders only walked one batter in four innings. But the mistakes were way too much to overcome on a day where temperatures hovered in the mid-40s and a gusty 20 mph wind chilled players to the bone.

&#8220When they don’t show up ready to play, things like that happen,” Warren Central coach Randy Broome said. &#8220There’s nothing you can do about it when your pitcher throws strikes and they don’t make the plays behind him. Keaton threw 96 pitches in four innings with one walk. That tells the story. In this game, it was nine against one.”

Although the errors helped pad Pearl’s run total, it actually blew the game open with a string of six straight hits during a seven-run second inning.

Zach Bridges led off with a double and scored on Walker’s infield single. Walker tried to bunt several times, then finally pulled the bat back and slashed a perfect roller just to the right of the pitcher’s mound. WC first baseman Jonathan Longmire had charged in for the bunt, second baseman Heath Carroll rotated to cover first, and once the ball got by the mound no one was there to fetch it, allowing Bridges to come all the way in from second.

Pearl (18-7) coach Jim Abraham said the original plan was to bunt toward third, where Lee was playing deep, but he changed the call after seeing Longmire creeping in.

&#8220That was our plan until we saw the first baseman had crashed pretty hard, then we were trying to put it between first and the mound,” Abraham said.

Four straight singles followed, including one by Howard that brought in two runs and gave the Pirates a 6-0 lead. An error and an RBI groundout by Nick Pitman scored two more runs and made it 8-0. In all, Pearl sent 12 men to the plate in the inning.

Two unearned runs in the fourth stretched it to 10-0 before WC finally got on the board in the top of the fifth. Chris Whittington doubled in a run and Longmire reached on a fielder’s choice to hold off the mercy rule, but only for a few minutes.

Pearl scored three more runs in the sixth – two of them unearned, courtesy of two Viking errors – and ended the game by the 10-run rule on Stephen Byrd’s sacrifice fly.