AUBURN — With his team protecting an three-run lead in the sixth inning, St. Dom’s relief pitcher Joe Bryant couldn’t quite get a read on what coach Bob Blackman was asking from the dugout.

Catcher Tyler Furtado could hear Blackman, however, so he went to the mound to ask Bryant what he wanted to throw to Lisbon cleanup hitter Dalton Dunphy, who already had two hits on the day. A third hit might tie the game.

Bryant chose the curveball, then threw the nastiest hook either side threw all day. Dunphy could do nothing but watch it drop off the table and into Furtado’s mitt for a called third strike that left the bases loaded and put a halt to Lisbon’s last and best chance to make it a new ballgame.

St. Dom’s jumped out to a 7-0 lead, then responded with just enough timely pitches, hits and defense to hold off the pesky Greyhounds on Wednesday,  10-5. The Saints avenged a 6-5 loss at Lisbon back on April 28.

“We really wanted those points back and we needed them,” Bryant said.

The Saints needed Bryant to pick up his first save of the season after starter Zak Johnson tired with one out in the sixth.

After a fielder’s choice at second put runners on the corners with two outs, Bryant walked No. 3 hitter Ryan Riordan on four pitches to load the bases.

Bryant found the plate again quickly to put Dunphy in an 0-2 hole and, given the choice on what to throw next, threw a pitch the Greyhounds might not have expected the last time they saw him.

“He threw a perfect one. He buckled (Dunphy),” Blackman said. “The last game at Lisbon, Joe started and had trouble throwing his curve over the plate and had to rely on his fastball.”

“I was throwing it good in warm-ups, so I figured I’d pull the string on him and it worked out,” Bryant said.

The Saints (7-3) jumped on Lisbon starter Ryan Riordan, who was making his first start of the season, for a pair of unearned runs in the first. In the third, they exploded for five runs on three successive two-out hits by Johnson (two-run single), Jimmy Theriault (RBI single) and Bryant (two-run triple).

“We’ve been struggling against the slower pitchers, but with their first pitcher (Riordan), he was faster than we’ve been seeing, so we were able to sit on that better,” Johnson said. “Most of the people that were struggling could time that up, hit it hard and just build off that.”

The Greyhounds (3-5) finally got to Johnson in the fourth with a two-run single by Kyle Bourget to make it 8-2. They could have made a bigger dent in the deficit if Johnson didn’t throw his glove hand up quick enough to snag Tucker Brannon’s liner back to the mound, stranding runners at second and third.

“That changed the game right there,” Lisbon coach Randy Ridley said. “We hit the ball right on the money. Tucker waited for his pitch and got a good piece of it. It just happened to be right at him. That’s kind of what our luck has been this year.”

Mitch Lorenz’s RBI single pushed the Saints’ lead to 8-2 in the fourth. Lisbon took a bigger bite out of the deficit in the fifth on two-out hits by Dunphy (RBI double) and Aaron Boyington (two-run single).

“We had to buckle down,” Bryant said. “We had a bad inning there and they came back, so we just put the pedal to the metal and didn’t let them come back again.”

After Bryant wiggled his way out of trouble in the top of the sixth, the Saints inflated the cushion back to five in the bottom of the frame. Matt Roy’s RBI single made it 9-5. It could have remained there after the Greyhounds turned a nifty 3-2 double play, but they thought getting Roy at the plate represented the third out and started to trot off the field. That allowed Furtado to score all the way from second with the final run.

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