PARKERSBURG — The very bottom of the Parkersburg South baseball batting order and the host Patriots’ pitching pretty much did in the Parkersburg Big Reds 8-2 Wednesday night in the first game of a two-out-of-three series to see which city team will capture the Class AAA Region IV, Section 1 title and advance on to regional play. A four-run second inning for South, now 16-3, highlighted by No. 8 hitter Jarritt Flinn’s two-RBI double and followed by No. 9 bat Blake McMullen’s two-run inside-the-park home run at Hank Greenburg Field gave the Patriots an early 4-0 they never relinquished, but just continued to build on. Game No. 2 in the series is slated at 6:30 p.m. today at Greenburg, with a third game if necessary set for the same time at the same venue Friday. South senior starter Ben Menarchek on the mound went 5.1 innings and left in the top of the sixth with an 8-2 lead, but with two PHS runners on base. Reliever Bryce Eagle came on and faced six batters, allowing no hits or runs while striking out three and issuing just one walk in his stint to finish the game. It was scoreless until the second when Flinn drove a pitch deep into left field over the retreating left fielder’s head to plate two runs for a 2-0 South lead.. Then McMullen lined a shot into center field that eluded the center fielder and got by him with McMullen racing around the bases for his two-run inside-the-park job to boost the Patriots’ advantage to 4-0. That was end of the day for PHS starting pitcher Hayden Morris, who was relieved by James Hickel for the rest of the game. In the third came the defensive gem of the night by South. Patriot third sacker Eagle retrieved a ball that had banged off him into foul territory and fired a throw to shortstop Todd Burner, who on the run tagged out a Big Red runner trying to go to third base on the play for the final out of the inning. In the bottom of the same inning, a Chase Freshour RBI single made it 5-0 for South before PHS tallied a run each in the fourth and fifth frames on RBI singles by Colby Wagner and Jordan Batten respectively. But South also scored twice more in the same innings. Menarchek hammered a triple that hit at the base of the outfield fence in the fourth and came home on a Burner sacrifice fly to center field, and in the last of the fifth, Flinn notched his third RBI on a run-scoring groundout. “Ben (Menarchek) pitched a heck of a game into the sixth inning,” said South head coach Todd Burner. Plus, he added that “both Jarritt (Flinn) and Blake (McMullen) have been coming through for the last couple days for us down at the bottom to get us back to the top of the order.” But he also noted that PHS, although now only 9-12, “is always tough, so give some credit to them, When to comes down to the PHS-South rivalry, who knows what’s going to happen. We got lucky tonight. You always want to win the first one, but we’ve still got to do it one more time.” In only three innings Wednesday night did the Big Reds have more than one base-runner. “We’ve got to have some more timely hits,” said PHS head coach Alan Burns. “We get somebody on, then we didn’t do anything with it. But we’ve got to put two or three hits together there. And we didn’t play with same intensity that we did on Monday. But tomorrow’s game is the one that really matters for us. It’s the key game that we have to have.”