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6th inning error derails reeling Cutters’ no-hit start

Williamsport’s pitching staff was cruising. Leonel Aponte didn’t allow a hit through his four innings and Brian Marconi carried that no-hitter through the fifth.

Then the wheels fell off. With one mistake, a wide throw to first to open the sixth inning, West Virginia was able to take advantage. The first four Black Bears batters of the inning reached bast. All four eventually scored, and West Virginia sent 10 to the plate in a five-run inning which led to its eventual 6-2 win over the Crosscutters.

As quickly as flipping a light switch, the game went from being completely dominated by Williamsport pitching to West Virginia’s offense not being able to make an out. The loss was Williamsport’s 14th in its last 16 games as it fell to 4-16. The Cutters’ .200 winning percentage in second-worst in all of minor league baseball, ahead of only the GCL Cardinals .111 (1-8) mark.

Making his Cutters debut, Marconi was clean in the fifth inning and appeared to carry that role into the sixth when he opened with a routine grounder to third. But McCarthy Tatum’s throw to first pulled D.J. Stewart off the bag. Then there was a single up the middle. Then there was another single to plate a run from Cory Wood. Then a double for another run from Jared Triolo.

It rolled out like a 18-wheeler down a mountain without any brakes. And before anyone in Bowman Field knew it, a potential Independence Day no-hitter had turned into a yes-hitter.

“Marconi has the ability to get people out, especially the lefties,” Cutters manager Pat Borders said. “If he had thrown the same pitch (to Wood) but maybe for a ball, then maybe you can get a chase out of it for strike three. So maybe the intent of the pitch needs to be slightly different. Even though it was a quality-pitched strike, maybe a ball would have been better in that situation.”

Five of West Virginia’s nine hits came in that inning. Five of its six runs came in that inning. It was the fifth time in 20 games Williamsport has allowed an inning of four runs or more.

And with the Cutters’ offense continuing to drive in runners on base, a sixth-inning four-run deficit seemed like much more. Not even Herbert Iser’s first professional home run which traveled an estimated 410 feet in the ninth inning was enough to spark the offense.

Leonel Aponte had set quite the tone for the Williamsport pitching staff. He allowed just one baserunner in his four innings, a two-out hit batter in a 1-2 count in the first inning. Even without a strikeout on his record for the afternoon, it was easily the best outing of his season and his first scoreless outing since Aug. 18 last year in the Gulf Coast League.

But despite having thrown just 40 pitches (29 for strikes), Aponte was lifted after just four innings because of the Philadelphia Phillies’ philosophy on developing pitchers at this level. Lakewood uses the same piggyback format with its starting pitchers where it essentially uses two players to make up one start.

“It’s part of the long-term approach to each one of them,” Borders said. “If you look back on (Aponte’s) first start to his second start to now, I think you can see improvement in his fastball and his breaking ball and one helping the other.”

After four scoreless innings, the Williamsport offense staked the pitching staff to a 1-0 lead when Hunter Hearn led off with a walk and moved to second on Nicolas Torres’ bunt single. After a wild pitch put runners on second and third, Tucker Maxwell drove a sacrifice fly to right field to give the Cutters a 1-0 lead.

Williamsport had other chances to score, like when it had runners on the corners with one out in the second inning. But Torres grounded into a 1-4-3 double play to end the frame. Or when Tatum hit a one-out double in the sixth and was stranded there by a pair of strikeouts.

Williamsport was just 1 for 6 with runners in scoring position, and that one hit was an infield single with a runner on second prior to Torres’ double play. The Cutters didn’t score again until Iser, a 23rd-round pick out of Dallas Baptist in last month’s draft, jumped all over a 93 mph fastball from Garrett Leonard for a solo shot in the ninth.

Iser is the third Williamsport catcher to homer this season, joining Logan O’Hoppe and Nick Matera.

“Competition (at catcher) is really good,” Borders said. “It’ll bring out the best in all of them. We have three pretty good catchers right now and they all can throw pretty well. That’s a good thing for anybody.”

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