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DALTON, Mass. – The Wahconah baseball team rallied for five runs in the bottom of the fifth to erase a two-run deficit and keep its playoff hopes alive with a 5-3 win over Mount Greylock at Pine Grove Park.
Ethan Orsini delivered an RBI double in the rally, helping him earn a complete-game win on the mound and helping his team win a third straight game and improve to 6-7 this spring.
Orsini allowed no earned runs in the victory – not even the two runs Mount Greylock scored in the top of the fifth to break a scoreless tie.
The hosts had nothing to show for their offensive efforts through five innings as Chase Doyle limited Wahconah to three hits and stranded four runners heading to the sixth.
“We were just like, ‘We gotta go, We’ve got to keep going,’ “ Orsini said of Wahconah’s mindset as it went to bat in the fifth. “We really want to win really badly. We want to go to the playoffs, and we have to win. In the situation we’re in, we have to win every game.”
Wahconah coach Ernie Wellington was pleased to see his team respond for the third straight day with its back to the wall.
“This was a great win,” he said. “This is a really tough team. Greylock’s a really tough team. It was nice to get that ‘W.’ We needed it.
“We can’t afford to lose. We’ve got to keep fighting. We just need to keep rolling. We’ve got Taconic on Friday, and it is what it is. Whatever happens happens. Then we’ve got PHS and then Granby and Monson.”
After having just three baserunners in the first four innings, Mount Greylock broke through against Orsini in the fifth.
Doyle got things started with a one-out double to center field. He then moved up on Jackson Shelsy’s single to short left and scored on an errant throw to second on a Shelsy steal.
Shelsy then came around to score on an another error – this time on a ground ball of the bat of Jack Cangelosi – to give the Mounties a 2-0 lead.
Orsini avoided further damage by getting the next two outs on ground balls.
And then his offense went to work.
Ben West started things off by working a leadoff walk, and he came home on Scott Duma’s double.
Orsini then made it two straight doubles and a 2-2 game but got caught in a rundown trying to stretch it into a triple for the inning’s first out.
Doyle then got a strikeout to make it two out with nobody on base, but Wahconah rallied for three more runs before he could end the inning.
First, Pat McLaughlin walked. Then he scored on Matt Kinser’s triple to right to take a 3-2 lead. Drew Wendling (3-for-3) drove home Kinser.
A Dave Striebel walk moved Kinser into scoring position, and he came home on Braedyn Melle’s single to make it 5-2.
Mount Greylock got a runner to third base in the top of the sixth, but Orsini got the final out on a swinging strike.
In the top of the seventh, the Mounties used two errors to generate their third run, but Wahconah second baseman Duma cleanly fielded a two-out groundball and fired to West at first base to end the game.
Wellington said his team, which lost three of its first four and then four in a row – including a 15-1 loss to Mount Greylock – may have been a little over-confident heading into the season.
“Honestly, I think these kids, when we first started out, they know they’re a good baseball team, and they outplayed themselves,” he said. “I think that they went in there with their heads too big in a few games that we should have won and we didn’t. And then it just dropped them down.
“We had to get out of that funk and start mixing things up in practice, changing things around a little bit and getting our heads back and not quitting on the season.”
Wahconah makes the short trip to play Taconic on Friday before coming back to Pine Grove Park on Saturday to finish a game against Pittsfield that was interrupted by rain on April 16.
Mount Greylock (13-3), which saw an eight-game winning streak come to an end on Wednesday, goes to Ludlow on Friday before finishing the regular season at Monument Mountain on Monday.