LEWISTON – These are not your older brother’s Oxford Hills Vikings.

But they’re still finding a way to win close baseball games.

The Vikings plated three runs in the first inning on two hits, two Lewiston errors and two stolen bases and that was more than enough for pitcher Tucker Hill as Oxford Hills tacked on two more in the third inning and upended the Blue Devils 5-0 at the Franklin Athletic Complex on Friday.

“We had to play a lot of small ball,” Oxford Hills coach Shane Slicer said. “(Lewiston pitcher Joe) Sullivan pitched really well, and we never got any good strikes at him. That’s how we’ve been playing all year, getting runs by manufacturing them.”

“We have to put ourselves in some good positions offensively,” Lewiston coach Todd Cifelli said, “but we have to start off better. We started off with errors and a walk, and we can’t do that. We have to start out better.”

Hill finished with four strikeouts and scattered five hits over seven innings. One of his two walks was an intentional pass, and he finished the game in just 102 pitches.

“I’m more of a ground-ball pitcher than a strikeout pitcher,” Hill said. “The fielders definitely helped today.”

Lewiston (2-3) hitters had a hard time figuring Hill out, in large part due to the hurler’s shifty curve ball.

“The curve ball was definitely working,” Hill said. “It was creating a lot of ground balls, and then switching to the fast ball, kept them off-balance.”

Not that Blue Devils’ pitcher Joe Sullivan did much worse. He, too, allowed just five hits, and two of the five Oxford Hills runs were unearned, the result of a few of the four errors committed by the Lewiston defense.

Sullivan finished with three strikeouts and five walks (one intentional).

Alex Newton paced the Vikings’ (3-2) attack with three singles. His first extended the first inning before D.J. Croy sacrificed Andrew Keniston home, and his second drove in a run in the top of the third inning, during which Oxford Hills plated two insurance runs on two hits a walk and an error.

“Shane’s the best coach in our league, and he did a great job with their running game, taking some risks,” Cifelli said. “That’s the benefit of being ahead.”

Sullivan settled down after that, allowing just two more hits in the final four innings.

On then other side, Lewiston got a few runners on, but could never quite move them over.

“We like to use the bunt game, but down 3-0, you’d better have first and second and no outs to try that, and we never got ourselves into that situation.”

Alex Wong smacked a double in the sixth, and Jeff Keene made it to second in the seventh on a walk and an error on a grouder by Scott Ouellette. Those were the only two Devils to make it past first base.