By Doug Smith
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — For a season’s record crowd on Cintas Document Night Friday, the Niagara Power ran off a copy of Thursday’s game.
Chane Lynch powered a big early lead, Jamie Suggs provided a quality start, the Bolts came unscrewed in the seventh and Scott Voyles recorded a lights-out save in a 6-5 victory over the Geneva Twins. Forty dozen fans – 480, count ‘em – cheered the Power to a victory eerily similar to Thursday’s 9-8 squeaker over Lake Ontario.
The twin killings raised the Power to 12-12 and solidified the lead over Geneva (12-15) for third place in the Western Division of the New York Collegiate Baseball League.
Lynch, whose three-run first-inning homer had boosted the Power out of the gate Thursday, here lofted a three-run triple to chase home Ryan Kiesel, Shakeel Newton and Adam Taylor in the third. When Lynch scored on Seth Eller’s sac fly, it was the team’s third RBI sacrifice of the game, following Neil DeCook’s fly ball and Ryan Jordan’s squeeze bunt in the second.
Newcomer Jamie Suggs then carried a 6-2 lead into the sixth, giving up just two hits including a home run by Adam Dickinson. But when he left, the thrills arrived, four hits cutting the lead to 6-5 before David Kaplan quenched the fire with one and two-thirds hitless innings.
Thursday, a 9-4 lead had similarly shrunk, despite a perfect, short outing by Kaplan.
And, as on Thursday, it was Voyles in the ninth, a 1-2-3 inning, not a gasp in the lot.
The longevity provided by Steve Beckham Thursday and Suggs Friday was crucial to the Power, who this afternoon start a series of three consecutive double-headers, first at Wellsville, then Olean, then Rochester. Next home date is the All-Star Game Wednesday at “The Mags.”
POWER POINT: The pre-game promotion had Cintas destroying documents for fans, and manager Garrett Shively was volunteering the last two nights’ seventh innings… Bob and Ann Heath, married 60 years, celebrated their big night at the ballpark, he throwing out a mid-game “first pitch”… FYI, the year they wed the Yanks beat the Dodgers – the Brooklyn Dodgers – in the World Series… NU’s Renee Polka, an on-the-job trainee, has done a nearly errorless job scoring and creating box scores, no easy task with the league-mandated PointStreak system, which has clouded some of the greatest minds in the game, although things threatened to go south Friday when a waterproof bee invaded the pressbox
Leave a Reply