It wasn’t pretty, but Uniontown wins opener
HOPWOOD – Ten errors and 10 runners left on base. Believe it or not those statistics belong to the winning team after Uniontown captured the first game of its Fayette American Legion playoff series against Charleroi. Despite the double-double of futility, Uniontown won 9-6 on Wednesday to take a 1-0 lead in the best-of-three semifinals series. When asked about the numbers, Uniontown Post 51 coach Ron Popovich was able to perhaps become the first coach in the history of baseball to make light of 10 errors. After all, it was a win.
“Is that it?” he asked sarcastically. “I thought we had more.”
It was the worst game Uniontown, now 20-4, has played all season, according to Popovich, who attempted to explain how his team won.
“I figured if we kept it within two or three runs we would be able to win,” Popovich said. “We are a good defensive team, but I knew once the bats started coming out we’d start making the big (defense) plays.”
The bats came out in the sixth inning when Uniontown, down 6-5, batted around its lineup and scored four runs on six hits.
Uniontown’s No. 1 and 2 hitters, Nick Midlik and Bryan Lipchinsky, led off the sixth with a pair of singles. The tandem, along with Bob Madison, paced Uniontown with three hits apiece in the game.
Joe Hoover bunted Lipchinsky and Midlik to second and third and reached base on the play when Charleroi catcher Pete Labrasca pumped faked a throw to third before missing Hoover at first.
“Hoover’s bunt was big,” Popovich said. “That got the inning rolling for us. We knew when we were down that that was going to be our big inning.”
Midlik scored on Paul Metz’s sac fly to tie the game and Lipchinsky also came home on the play when leftfielder Sam Manna overthrew Labrasca.
Two insurance runs also came in the inning when Madison drilled a liner to centerfield plating Hoover and Madison scored on a Jim Blosser single to right-center.
“They had timely hits,” said Charleroi coach Luke Mollis. “They had a couple of bloops and a couple of good hits. That’s the way it goes.”
Neil Pascarella started the game for Charleroi pitching 5 1-3 innings, giving up nine runs on 10 hits, walking six and striking out six.
“I probably waited to long to pull (Pascarella),” admitted Mollis, who sent Matt Dischong to the mound after Uniontown’s Tim Dye loaded the bases with one out in the inning. “It’s harder to juggle when you are hoping he gets out of the inning. He had a little hard time finding his zone.”
Hoover sure didn’t have a hard time finding his zone. The Uniontown lefthander improved his record to 5-0 on the season, including 3-0 against Charleroi, pitching a complete game with five strikeouts and remarkably no walks. Hoover surrendered seven hits and six runs, but naturally with 10 errors, none of the six were earned.
“Joe didn’t get rattled,” Popovich said. “He kept (his team committing 10 errors) to himself because he knows we got a good defense and our defense knows he will get us a lot of groundball outs.”
Charleroi scored the latter three of its six runs in the fourth inning to take a one-run lead. Pascarella provided the inning’s only RBI hit when he singled up the middle to score Labrasca and Mario Fragella.
Uniontown scored five runs in the first three innings, but it could have been more as it left seven runners on base in that span including the bases loaded in the second inning.
Kris Marchewka led Charleroi with two hits. Marchewka will start game two today at Charleroi beginning at 5:30 p.m.