FARMINGTON – The Gardiner Tigers are the hottest team in the KVAC, and nothing, not a nine-day layoff or playing a home game on the road, can cool them off.
Gardiner committed five errors and squandered a three-run lead in the seventh and still managed to pull out a 5-4 win over Mt. Blue in eight innings at Hippach Field Friday.
Mike Burdin’s sacrifice fly in the bottom of the eighth scored pinch runner Dan Fortune with the winning run, giving the Tigers (11-2) their 11th win in a row.
The game was originally scheduled to be played in Gardiner, but unplayable conditions forced it to be moved to the Cougars’ home field. Having last ups turned out to be the most important thing to the Tigers.
“We would have liked to have played at home because it was Senior Day for our seniors, but you gotta do what you gotta do to get the games in,” said Gardiner coach Jim Palmer, whose team last played, and saw the outdoors, on May 18. “We wanted to play these guys, and where they’d beaten us the first time around, see if we’ve gotten any better.”
Gardiner held a 4-1 lead heading into the seventh, and starter Mike Taylor (seven innings, one earned run, seven hits, five Ks, one walk) seemed to be cruising after tossing his only 1-2-3 inning in the sixth. But three errors and a clutch two-out, two-run single by Luke Lambert tied it up.
“I think he got a little bit tired and left it upstairs and they started to hit the ball,” Palmer said.
Gardiner made the Cougars (9-5) pay for their own fielding miscues in the eighth, though. Eric Hachey reached base to lead off the inning on a bobbled grounder by the third baseman. After a sacrifice bunt moved the winning run to second, Tom Colby laid a perfect bunt down the first base line that had both the first baseman and the pitcher in pursuit. Pitcher Will Underkuffler got to it first, but was a step behind Colby running down the line and couldn’t apply the tag and had no one to throw it to because first base was uncovered. That set up the winning run at third and opened the door for Burdin’s sac fly, which otherwise would have been the third out.
“On that play, we tell the first baseman to take a quick step in and determine whether it’s his ball or the pitcher’s,” said Mt. Blue coach Gary Parlin, “but there was nothing he could do on that one because it was just perfectly placed.”
Taylor was placing most of his pitches perfectly in the early going, though the Tigers’ defense looked rusty due to the layoff. Hachey’s two-run single in the second spotted him a 2-0 lead. Mt. Blue cut that in half in the third after John Moloney was able to retreat to second when the base was left uncovered in a rundown, thus keeping him alive to score on Hal Robbins’ RBI single. Taylor responded by retiring 10 of the next 11 Cougars.
“We want to swing at good pitches early in the count, but we were swinging at some bad ones,” said Mt. Blue coach Gary Parlin.
An RBI triple by Burdin, who also picked up the win in relief, and an RBI single by Stefan Black off Cougar starter Nick Tibbetts added to the Gardiner lead in the fifth. Underkuffler came on and pitched effectively in relief, wiggling out of a bases loaded, two-out jam in the seventh.
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