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Waynesburg leads after eight

By Mike Ciarochi mciarochi@heraldstandard.Com 2 min read

Neither team won, but neither team lost, either.

Monday’s Fayette County American Legion Baseball League playoff opener between Waynesburg and Smithfield-Fairchance was suspended due to darkness, with Waynesburg clinging to a 12-11 lead through eight innings.

The game will be completed at 5:30 p.m. today at Masontown-German Park, before Game 2 of the best-of-three series gets underway. Waynesburg’s field is not available Tuesday, so they agreed to return to Masontown for their home game.

Waynesburg manager Lonnie Nicholls will have all of his players available, but he may want to double-check that Colton Lippencott is present and accounted for before he leaves Waynesburg for Masontown.

All Lippencott did Monday was drive in four runs, including the go-ahead runs on a two-run homer. He was 4-for-4 with a homer, double and two singles and a walk.

If that wasn’t enough, Lippencott pitched 4 2/3 innings of relief and held Smithfield-Masontown to four earned runs on five hits with seven strikeouts and only one walk.

Waynesburg starter John Coss didn’t give up a hit until the third inning, but was tagged for five hits, but only four of the seven runs he allowed were earned.

Smithfield-Fairchance got three runs batted in from Cody Riggin on two hits, while Micah High’s two-run double highlighted a five-run fourth inning.

Trailing 8-1, Waynesburg came back with nine runs in the fifth and sixth innings before Smithfield-Fairchance came back themselves with a three-run sixth to take an 11-10 lead before Lippencott’s homer turned the tables, at least for Monday night.

“We’ll be back at 5:30 to finish this one up, then play another nine innings,” Nicholls said. “We could have easily given up when we were down, but we battled back and made a game of it. We’re 5-2 in our last seven games primarily because we started to hit the ball.”

Both teams have all of their pitching available due to American Legion’s rule that allows a pitcher to work 12 innings in a three-day span.

“We started off pretty well, but then the bottom fell out there in the fifth and sixth innings (eight errors),” Smithfield-Fairchance manager Bryan Goletz said. “We had a lot of games down the stretch and we used a lot of pitching to get the regular season done. But these are young kids learning the game and we didn’t give up, either.

“I’ll take my chances down 12-11 in the ninth inning.”

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