Baseball: Union Holds Off Late Dayton Rally to Win, 8-7

SPRINGFIELD, NJ -- Union hit the ball better than it has all season in the first inning, but then the Farmers had to hang on for dear life in the last two innings in the face of a Dayton rally that fell just short, as Union won, 8-7, Friday at Ruby Field.

Dayton, after trailing, 8-1, in the second inning, scored five runs in the sixth inning and one in the bottom of the seventh, and had the tying run on first base with its best hitter on deck when the game ended on a sharp groundout to Zach Mott at shortstop.

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It was the second win in a row for Union, which had lost to Dayton, 14-8, in the first week of the season when the Bulldogs had the kind of first inning that day that Union had on Friday. Twelve Farmer batters came to the plate in the top of the first. Seven of them got hits, two reach on errors and by the time freshman starting pitcher Mike Heaton took the mound, he had a 7-0 lead before he ever threw a pitch.

Then, when Heaton finally did got on the hill, he threw mostly strikes for five brilliant innings, giving the Farmers the kind of length and stability they weren't getting from their pitching early in the season.

"I went out there calm, because we were in the lead," Heaton said. "My job was to throw strikes and let our defense do a good job. I threw two-seamers, four-seamers, a change and a curve."

In the first five innings, Heaton allowed one run and one walk and struck out two, as, instead of getting strikeouts, he just kept throwing strikes with the poise of someone who was not, in fact, making the first start of his varsity career. It is, however, Heaton's third victory. He has two wins in relief.

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"This was his first start. He had two other wins, and we know we can rely on him to throw strikes and compete," Union's first-year head coach Lou Clemente said. "For most of the game, we made the plays behind him."

Matt Perrotto pitched the last 1 2/3 innings, coming in from shortstop to relieve.

In the top of the first, Ethan Beaumont reached on an error, then Perrotto, Nick Bertolotti and Gabriel Gobbi followed with consecutive singles. Gobbi's hit drove in the first run of the game, and he finished the day 3-for-4 with two runs scored.

Matthew Mendez' two-run double to deep left-center made it 3-0. Jayden Walton hit an RBI single to right field. After a single by Jeffrey Field, subsequent runs came in on an error and a sacrifice fly by Perrotto.

Dayton (4-7) got a run back in the bottom of the first. Frank Dasti -- who was 3-for-3 with an RBI and was waiting on deck when the game ended -- lined a single to center with one out, Mike Ramirez' double to center sent him to third, and Brandyn Bernknopf's  sac fly gave the Bulldogs their first run.

Union (4-8) scored a run on an error in the second inning for an 8-1 lead, but by that time, Patrick Ferguson had come on in relief for Dayton, and the sophomore right-hander did a standout job of keeping Union's bats at bay the rest of the way. Ferguson -- who recently held a very good Scotch Plains-Fanwood team to two hits in five innings pitched -- went 6 1/3 innings, allowing four hits and three walks and walking four.

Dayton rallied in earnest in the sixth inning, with Anthony Bianchi driving on a run with a pinch-single, Dasti hitting a sacrifice fly, and three more runs scoring on a pair of two-out errors to cut Union's lead to 8-6.

In the bottom of the seventh, Jon Rodrigues led off with a sizzling smash through the third baseman's glove. He came in to score with two outs on Bianchi's second RBI single of the game that brought the Bulldogs to within a run, 8-7. But Perrotta got the final out when Mott made a nice pickup of a hard grounder headed up the middle.

"In that first inning, we put it all together and hit the ball as well as we have this season," Clemente said. "I think a key was that we were swinging at the first strike instead of our hitters getting into an 0-1 or 0-2 hole."

In addition to Gobbi's three-hit game, Walton was 2-for-4 with two RBI for Union. Beaumont was on base five times out of the leadoff spot for the Farmers, but he paid a price for it -- three of those times on base were the result of getting hit by pitches in the third, fifth and seventh innings, but Union's DH lived to tell about it.

Union, after losing its first five games of the season, is 4-3 in its last seven games.

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