Northmen agony and ecstasy
Pascoe delivers walk-off single in 10th to sink CF
Every time the No. 5 Central Falls and No. 4 North Smithfield baseball teams met this season the Northmen won, but the gap kept getting closer and closer.
The Northmen produced wins by six runs and four runs during the regular season, and they also earned a two-run win in last week’s playoff opener.
So, it was only fitting with each team’s season on the line Wednesday afternoon, the contest would go into extra innings. With Jacob Forbes representing the game-winning run at third base with two outs in the 10th inning, Trevor Pascoe looped a single to left field off of reliever Yelvin Munoz to lift the Northmen to a 5-4 Division III losers’ bracket victory in 10 innings.
“I just took a huge deep breath and I knew it was time to put everything to work we’ve practiced,” said Pascoe, who finished the contest withthree hits. “We’ve worked on hitting so much over the last couple of weeks. He was throwing a ton of curveballs, so I knew something was coming. The first curve was a ball and then he threw a fastball. I knew I wasn’t going to get a better pitch than that.”
“It was crazy game from the get go,” North Smithfield coach Jon Leddy said. “There was a lot of lackadaisical play at times and we ran into a lot of outs. The kids know we can’t play that way during playoff time. I think they know they got lucky because we couldn’t let (CF) hang around because they’re a good offensive team;”
It was a disappointing way to end the season for Central Falls (10-10), but this season was a big improvement for a program which had won just 11 combined games in the previous four seasons. Freshman starting pitcher Kelvin Almonte allowed eight hits and five earned runs in six innings of work, while Munoz took the loss after allowing seven hits and a run in 3.2 innings.