Click here to subscribe today or Login.
By BILL SAVAGE; Times Leader Sports Writer
Monday, July 26, 1993 Page: 6C QUICK WORDS: WINGS RALLY BY BARONS
MOOSIC — For a few innings, the Red Barons had the makings of a beautiful
Sunday night at Lackawanna County Stadium.
Of course, it all unraveled before the night was over. Rochester took
advantage of an eighth inning filled with Red Barons mistakes to tie the game,
then won it 5-4 in the ninth.
If only the Red Barons, now 43-59, losers of 15 of their past 19 and now 11
games behind the first-place Red Wings in the International League East, could
have stretched those first few innings through the entire evening…
“It’s like Ruben (Amaro) said when he came up to me on the bench in the
ninth inning,” said manager George Culver, whose troubles were only compounded
after the game when he returned to his office and found a big “M”
spray-painted on his wall.
“He said, `I don’t know whose law it is, Murphy’s Law or whatever, but
whatever can go wrong goes wrong.”‘
The Red Barons’ clubhouse, apparently the scene of some vandalism between
Saturday night and Sunday, was as quiet as it possibly could be after Sunday’s
loss. The Red Barons had a 4-1 lead during the game and Pat Combs, pitching
for the first time in 10 weeks, looked sharp in his return to the mound off
the disabled list.
But Rochester, 54-48, held tight, thanks to the pitching of rehabilitating
Baltimore Orioles left-hander Arthur Rhodes.
And in the eighth, the Red Barons gave the Red Wings the opening they
needed to pull even.
The score was 4-2 and Paul Fletcher had one out when Scott Coolbaugh hit a
grounder to Jeff Manto at first base. Fletcher dropped Manto’s throw, then
Fletcher threw two wild pitches and walked two batters before he was replaced
by Jeff Patterson with the score 4-3.
“He just took his eye off the ball a little bit,” said Culver of Fletcher’s
error. “It wasn’t a very good throw, but I thought he could have caught the
ball.”
Rochester’s Randy Ready singled in the tying run. Then in the ninth, Mark
Parent doubled and Coolbaugh followed with a run-scoring double that cost
Patterson, 4-3, the game.
Don Schulze, 8-2, then stranded a runner on third by striking out Amaro to
end the game.
After Rochester scored a first-inning run off Combs, Gene Schall homered in
the second for his first Class AAA home run. Then Amaro followed with a
three-run shot off Rhodes that seemingly put the Red Barons on their way.
Combs gave up a run in the fourth on three singles. After the third hit, to
Ready, he was replaced, having thrown 64 pitches.
Combs said he threw an old favorite pitch, his split-finger fastball, for
the first time in two years on Sunday.
“I had a couple of strikeouts with it,” he said. “We picked our spots with
it.
“The split-finger was always a good strikeout pitch for me; it was nice to
start using it again,” said Combs, who is coming back from a shoulder injury
he suffered in May. “The last time I used it was against the Astros (for
Philadelphia) in June of `91.”
Both teams had runners thrown out at the plate in key situations, Schall
being nailed in the sixth after a Cary Williams single and the Red Barons
throwing out Mark Smith an inning before on a Coolbaugh ground-out.
Rochester, which has won nine of 10, leads second-place Ottawa by 6 games.
The Red Barons are 4 behind the Lynx for the final IL East playoff spot and
trail Pawtucket for third place by two games.