By Kameron Towle
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SPRINGFIELD, Vt. – Green Mountain took down Springfield 7-2 in interdivisional baseball action Monday at Birsky Wyman Field.
The Chieftains’ Dylan McCarthy (four innings) and Ty Merrill (three innings) combined to hold the Cosmos to just one hit in the win that brought GM to 2-0 on the young season.
For the Cosmos, first-year head coach Justin Devoid has seen a repeating pattern over the first four games, but thinks his young group will break through soon enough.
“We’ve got to score some runs,” said Devoid. “We’re a little passive at the plate right now, but we’re learning.”
Springfield’s lone-hit came from Kaleb Chambers, who singled to lead off the bottom of the second.
Both starting pitchers, GM’s McCarthy and Springfield’s Sam Presch, played well in the early going, and the two freshmen were leading their clubs to a 2-2 game through four innings.
In the top of the second, GM’s Everett Mosher had an RBI groundout and McCarthy knocked in another run with a hard chopper to short.
The Cosmos battled back to tie the game in the bottom of the fourth with two outs. A sacrifice bunt from Connor Starr put both Greg Otis and Collin Pinney in scoring position, and both would cross home plate on passed balls.
With the bases loaded and two outs in the top of the fifth inning, a 3-2 pitch to Mosher just barely missed the plate, walking in the Chiefs’ go-ahead run. GM tallied two more in the fifth to take a 5-2 lead.
In the bottom of the fifth, Presch came up to the plate for the Cosmos with a runner on second, and came up with the furthest-hit ball of the day, pushing GM right fielder Keegan Ewald back to the fence. Lunging back towards the right field fence, Ewald made the diving catch, and halted any momentum the Cosmos hoped to gain.
“He might be one of only two or three guys on our team that can make that catch,” said GM head coach Matt McCarthy on Ewald.
“It was a scrappy win,” coach McCarthy continued. “We had some ugly points but we also had some bright spots. It’s one of those games that we had to get… it’s division two… it’s index points.”
Coach McCarthy chose to replace his son, Dylan, on the mound in the fifth inning to keep him fresh with the thick of the GM schedule coming up.
For GM, freshman lead-off hitter Reid Hryckiewicz had three singles, going 3-for-3, with 2 walks, a stolen bag and an RBI.
While the Chiefs are 2-0 and have three more games this week, the Cosmos slip to 0-4 with two games later in the week and a chance to find the right track.
“We’ve been in games, and we’ve been close,” said coach Devoid. “It’s a good young group but we just got to stop beating ourselves to put us in a situation to win.”
The Cosmos are at Leland and Gray Wednesday and host Brattleboro Thursday. For the Chiefs, they are at Woodstock today, play host to Leland and Gray on Thursday, and then travel to MSJ on Saturday morning.
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