STRONG — Winthrop pitcher Ryan Baird said he didn’t have his best stuff Friday afternoon at Mt. Abram.
He still did more than enough to help the Ramblers get the victory.
Baird threw five shutout innings and drove in a pair of runs before Winthrop held off a seventh inning Mt. Abram rally to take a 5-3 victory. Winthrop improved to 9-4, while the Roadrunners fell to 7-7.
“I felt all right. It wasn’t one of my best games. I struggled to find the strike zone a little bit,” Baird said.
Baird allowed three hits and three walks while hitting a pair of batters and striking out four. Still, only one Mt. Abram runner advanced to third base on Baird, and he left the game with a 5-0 lead.
“We’re trying to keep (Baird’s) pitch count down for a big upcoming game with Lisbon,” Winthrop coach David Theriault said. “Se we asked Gavin (Perkins) to come in in a tough situation and he did a good job.”
With one out in the bottom of the seventh inning, Mt. Abram mounted a comeback, with six straight hitters reaching base. Ethan Powell walked with the bases loaded to cut Winthrop’s lead to 5-2, and Hunter Warren’s fielder’s choice made it 5-3 with two outs.
With the tying run on first base, Ramblers center fielder Jackson Ladd tracked down a Trevor Phelps fly ball for the final out, his sixth putout of the game.
“It’s always nice when there’s a fly ball heading anything near the (direction) of center field. We’ve always got to feel pretty good about that. Credit to Mt. Abram. They hung tough,” Theriault said.
The Roadrunners stranded 10 runners.
“We haven’t hit all year. We’ve got guys that can hit but we haven’t hit. It’s not sometimes, how many hits, but the timely ones,” Mt. Abram coach Jeff Pillsbury said.
Winthrop took a 1-0 lead in the first when Ladd was hit by the first pitch of the game, stole second base, then scored on Jacob Carter’s two-out single. A sacrifice fly to center by Baird scored Perkins with two out in the second to push Winthrop’s lead to 2-0.
The Ramblers added a pair of unearned runs in the fourth, helped by a Mt. Abram error. A pair of Roadrunner errors contributed to another Winthrop run in the sixth, giving the Ramblers a 5-0 lead.
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