Friday’s game: Goldpanners take series advantage with 6-2 win
With the first two games being split between the Goldpanners and Bercovich Honors, both teams looked to find an advantage in Friday’s contest. The Goldpanners rolled along without much resistance for a 6-2 win.
“I thought we played well today,” Goldpanners’ field manager Carlos Gonzales said about the win postgame. “We got the bats going a little bit. They threw a guy who was pretty funky out there, throwing 75 miles per hour sidearm and also going over the top, so sometimes it can be hard to adjust to that.”
Alaska picked up four unanswered runs over the course of the second through fourth innings to grab the lead early on. In the bottom of the second, a Hayden Iverson sacrifice fly drove in the first run of the game. A pair of runs driven in from Matt Chavez and Tyson Reis extended the advantage in the third, and Griffin Harrison made it 4-0 with a sacrifice fly in the fourth.
On the mound, Shaw Lee kept the Honors scoreless through their first five trips to the plate. The visitors finally broke through in the sixth with a pair of runs, but it proved to be their only run support of the game.
Lee finished with six innings pitched, two earned runs, five hits allowed, four strikeouts and two walks. He was followed in relief by Andrew Troppman, who finished out the final three innings of the game in scoreless fashion with only one hit allowed and four strikeouts.
“Shaw Lee was great,” Gonzales said. “His last two starts have been the best of the summer for him, and then Tropmann came in and really saved our bullpen by going three [innings] to end this game.”
The Goldpanners grabbed two more scores before the game’s close, with one coming in the seventh and the other in the eighth. In the bottom of the eight, Matt Leiterman provided an emphatic home run, which saw the ball cross over into the Fairbanks Curling Club parking lot to put an exclamation point on the victory.
At the plate, Leiterman led the way going 2-3 with an RBI and two walks out of the cleanup spot. Other multi-hit performances came courtesy of Harrison (2-4) and Chavez (2-5). With the 6-2 win, the Goldpanners headed into Saturday’s game looking to make it two in a row.
Saturday’s game: Goldpanners take series with blowout win
In their first at-bat in the bottom of the first, Griffin Harrison launched a home run to give the Goldpanners the lead. It was a sign of things to come, as they picked up their second win in a row.
By the end of the first three innings, the lead had grown to 5-0. Along with Harrison’s blast, Jacob Badawi and Alex Garcia both brought in runs in the first inning on an error and a walk. Matt Chavez drove in another in the second with a single before Harrison drove in his second run of the game in the third with a sacrifice fly.
Bercovich rallied back in the fifth with three runs driven in. Lucas Zack’s start for the Goldpanners came to a close in the inning. He went 4.2 innings with three earned runs, five walks, one hit allowed and seven strikeouts. Manny Lopez came on to pick up the final out of the inning, extinguishing the first real threat of the game for Alaska.
Any hopes of a comeback for Bercovich were quickly dashed in the fifth and sixth. Seven more runs were brought in over the two frames, with four coming in the fifth, where Bubba Rocha, Matt Chabes, Jesse Espinoza and Jacob Badawi each contributed to bring in the runs.
In the sixth, Harrison, Matt Leiterman and Jesse Espinoza did the damage, advancing the deficit. Their final runs of the game came in the eighth, where a passed ball and two hit by pitches made it 15-3.
Harrison (3-4, four RBIs) and Matt Chavez (5-6, one RBI) led the way for a Goldpanner lineup that accumulated 19 hits as a team. Alaska will look to take their third game in a row against the Honors as the two teams play again on Sunday at 2:30 p.m.
