10 trips around the diamond to home plate in the fifth inning pushed the UConn baseball team (4-8) to an 11-1 win over the Long Island Sharks on Tuesday afternoon for their 2,000th win in program history.
Both squads were tied 1-1, until Tyler Minick hit a 461-mph homer to left field, scoring a run for himself and redshirt freshman Rob Rispoli, who was at third base when Minick went up to bat.
Minick’s bomb of a hit was the fuel to the fire for the Huskies, as the Huskies scored nine other consecutive runs in the rest of the inning from Ryan Daniels, Sam Biller, Connor Lane, Caleb Shpur, Rispoli, Daniels again and Bryan Padilla.
“I thought we looked a little tight offensively, early, couple quick outs, early but then Robby [Rispoli] leads us off and he does a great job leading us off. He’s certainly solidifying himself in that spot.” said head coach Jim Penders in an interview on the teams’s twitter when asked about the game.
Rispoli, who missed last season due to injury, has been an integral part of the Husky roster notching a batting average toil of .343 and has taken lots of pressure off of Minnick in the lead off position according to Penders.
Despite this pivotal inning, it wasn’t all Huskies from the start. Long Island lit the lamp in the first inning with catcher Joseph Durso hitting a single to the right field and Noah Sorensen scored and put the Sharks on the board first.
However, at the bottom of the first inning, Padilla scored an RBI with two outs, bringing Grant MacArthur to third base and Daniels ran to homeplate to score the run for the Huskies.
For the rest of the game, up until the fifth inning, both squads were tied neck and neck with the score at one.
This was by way of red shirt freshman, right-handed pitcher Thomas Galusha.
“He’s [Galusha] waited a long time to get back on the mound and he wasn’t very good in his debut in Puerto Rico, but he worked on some things and looks really good. He’s [Galusha] got really good stuff, so that was fun to watch.” said Penders in the teams’ interview on twitter.
In total, Galusha didn’t allow any runs and once he was replaced by Frank Spirito IV, who notched a 1-2-3 in his UConn collegiate debut in the top of the sixth inning.
After the fifth inning, neither team put runs up on the board again, until the game came to a close in the bottom of the seventh inning.
Next up, the Huskies will travel to Buies Creek, N.C. to take on Campbell University for a three-game series. The first pitch for Friday’s game is scheduled for 6 p.m., for Saturday, 1 p.m. and the first pitch on Sunday is scheduled for 1 p.m. Husky fans can listen in to these games at MIXLR.