Baseball: Monsters End Home Season With 12 Inning Win Over Tigers

Courtesy Vermont Lake Monsters

BURLINGTON — 23 hours after delivering Vermont’s first walkoff win of the season with an RBI double at midnight of Thursday’s doubleheader, Kevin Richards recorded another game-ender with a bases loaded walk in the bottom of the 12th for a Lake Monsters 2-1 win over the Connecticut Tigers before 2,388 fans on Friday night at historic Centennial Field.

After neither team could take advantage of a placed runner at second base to start the 10th and 11th innings, Clark Cota worked around a leadoff hit batter to keep the Tigers scoreless top 12th.
Marty Bechina led off the bottom of the 12th with a sacrifice bunt to advance Logan Davidson over to third base.

Playing its fourth straight extra-inning game, Vermont got a four-pitch walk to Kyle McCann and Connecticut then elected to intentionally walk Jordan Diaz to load the bases. Tigers reliever Alfredo Silvia (0-1) threw two straight balls to fall behind Richards, then after a foul ball for strike one, threw two more balls to Richards forcing home Davidson with the winning run.

Earlier after leaving the bases loaded with no outs in the second, Vermont scored an unearned run in the third when Jose Rivas reached on a throwing error and scored on a Shane Selman RBI groundball double off the glove of shortstop Ryan Kriedler.

Game stayed 1-0 all the way to the ninth Kriedler walked with one out and advance to second on a pickoff attempt throwing error by catcher Rivas with two outs. The error proved costly as Jake Holton followed with an RBI groundball single to center to tie the game.

Lake Monsters starter Seth Shuman allowed just one hit, a one-out fourth inning single, with two walks over five scoreless innings. The sixth-round pick out of Georgia Southern finishes his first pro season with a 2.39 ERA (10 earned runs in 37 2/3 innings) over his 11 Vermont outings.

Vince Coletti allowed two hits and had two strikeouts as he got the final out of the ninth inning before back-to-back scoreless 10th and 11th innings. Cota (2-3) had a strikeout in his one frame to earn the win. Diaz and Selman both had two of the Lake Monsters nine hits.

Vermont (33-40), which finishes with a 18-20 record while drawing just over 83,000 fans at Centennial Field this season, head down to Tri-City for the final three games of the season 7:00 pm Saturday, 5:00 pm Sunday and 3:00 pm Monday.