BIDDEFORD — With the American Legion Zone 5 baseball regular season coming to a close and games about to come thick and fast due to the recent rainy weather, a quality pitcher who can go the full seven innings is worth his weight in gold.

On Thursday, Noble had just such a hurler, as Caleb Chambers threw a complete-game five-hitter, striking out five while walking just two, to lead his team to a 6-3 victory over Biddeford-Saco Savings at St. Louis Field.

The victory, its fifth-straight, solidified Noble’s place in the top four playoff positions as it improved to 8-6 on the season, while Biddeford fell to 3-10.

Chambers, a right-handed junior, made just one appearance during the high school season for the Knights but was on point Thursday, using both a hard-hitting fastball and his breaking pitches to full effect as he allowed Biddeford just one hit ”“ a Nate Huot RBI double ”“ in the first four innings.

“He had pretty good velocity,” Biddeford coach Keith LeBlanc said of Chambers. “He kept the ball down, and we weren’t getting a good piece of anything. We faced him a few weeks ago and he did the same thing. He pounds the zone, throws a lot of strikes, isn’t walking guys all over the place; that’s usually a pretty good recipe.”

“He kept the ball down, and he kept them off-balance throwing his breaking ball,” said Noble coach Adam Hale. “He got ahead most of the time in the count, so it kept those guys guessing and led to a lot of groundball outs.”

Brady Crepeau, a freshman who threw 33 innings during the high school season and has thrown nearly that many this summer, started for Biddeford and didn’t have his usual control on his breaking pitches.

With Noble taking an aggressive approach at the plate and often going the other way with pitches, Crepeau gave up 10 hits and two walks in five innings, giving up six earned runs to take the loss.

“The command wasn’t quite there, and he’s a guy who needed to locate pitches to be successful,” LeBlanc said. “Or it seemed like he’d hit a good spot and they’d get a seeing-eye single that would sneak through. They placed them in good spots, and that’s baseball sometimes.”

After working a scoreless first, Crepeau gave up a double to Christian Montembeau to start the second. Brett Burke then singled in Montembeau, and came around to score on Joe Hashem’s groundout with the bases loaded.

Crepeau then allowed three more in the third as Chambers singled, got to third on a stolen base and passed ball and then scored on a Montembeau single. Burke followed with a double to get runners on second and third, and groundouts from Ryan Strate and Brady Waterman scored both runs as Noble took a 5-1 lead.

“The first inning we watched (Crepeau) and he was working every guy away,” Hale said. “It’s tricky because he’s a lefty and he throws that good little breaking ball, but some of the guys adjusted and started to go the other way, and then they could sit on his fastball a little bit more as the game went on. Even though we were aggressive at the plate, we swung at strikes.”

Noble added another in the fourth on a Chambers RBI single, but Biddeford kept it interesting with two runs off Chambers in the fifth.

Joey Curit started the inning by hustling out a double to left, moving to third on an Austin Dutremble infield single and scoring on Nate Ackerman’s sacrifice fly. A Kerry Crepeau infield single then gave Biddeford runners on third and first, with a Dominick Day grounder to shortstop scoring Dutremble to make it 6-3.

But Chambers buckled down in the last two innings, working around a hit batter in the sixth and a lead-off single in the seventh to preserve the win for Noble, and move it one step closer to next week’s Zone 5 playoffs.

“The kids are getting excited,” said Hale, whose team finished 3-13 during the high school season, with five of those losses coming by one run. “You win some games, and it seems like there’s more emotion and the kids are playing a little bit better right now.”

On the other side, Biddeford won’t be making an appearance in the zone playoffs. But it didn’t make the Legion postseason last season either, only to come back with a sterling 14-3 record during this spring’s high school season, something that gives LeBlanc hope moving forward into next year.

“This summer’s been a lot of guys playing in and hitting new spots where they might play next year, just kind of getting a feel for that spot and what to expect there,” LeBlanc said. “The kids have done a good job plugging away, but there’s been a lot of situations that went our way during the regular season that haven’t in the summer. That’s baseball, it’s ups and downs, and you’ve got to work through all of them.”

— Staff Writer Cameron Dunbar can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 323 or [email protected].