UW-L can’t complete comeback
It’s the No. 1 team in the nation for a reason.
The SUNY Cortland baseball team got up early and kept the pressure on late in the opening round of the Division III College World Series. UW-La Crosse fell 11-3 in the nightcap at Fox Cities Stadium on Tuesday.
The best-of-three series will continue at 11 a.m. Wednesday. If 22nd-ranked UW-L wins, a third game will be played for the championship. The Eagles, playing their fifth game since Saturday, used only one pitcher, Shane Adler, who gave up 15 hits, two walks, seven earned runs and struck out three.
Tuesday’s championship opener was the second game of the day for the Eagles (36-15). They opened with a 10-7 win over Trinity (40-14) to get to the championship series. That game started about 11 a.m. and didn’t finish up until around 8 p.m. because of a rain delay.
Not that playing such a long, drawn-out game was an excuse but, against Cortland (43-4), UW-L had two errors – one on the first at-bat it faced – that led to two first-inning runs.
In the second inning, the Red Dragons took advantage of a hit batsman and another error to score three more.
The Eagles got a pair back-to-back RBI singles by Travis Buxton-Verstegen and Joel Zyhowski and pulled within 5-3 with another run in the top of the seventh on a Justin Anderson RBI, but Cortland put its foot down after that.
The Red Dragons answered with three runs on four hits in the bottom half of the inning and three more runs on five hits in the eighth to end all hope for the Eagles.
Buxton-Verstegen was 3-for-4, Zhhowski was 2-for-4 and Taylor Kohlwey was 2-for-5 for the Eagles, who had 10 hits.