The Maine baseball team continued their assault on UMBC pitching on Sunday afternoon to complete a three game weekend conference sweep 13-2 at Alumni Field in Catonsville, Maryland. The Black Bears hit four homeruns in the victory.
Maine (10-13, 7-2 America East) pulled away and cruised to the win with one huge inning in the third when they put a nine spot on the scoreboard. The Black Bears got a single run in each of the first two innings for a 2-0 lead on solo homeruns by Jeremiah Jenkins and Jordan Schulefand. Then the third inning came. Joe Bramanti started the rally with a two-run homerun, his third of the weekend and ninth of the season. Connor Goodman and Schulefand both had two-run doubles, Jeff Mejia an RBI groundout, Jenkins hit his second solo homer of the day, and Scout Knotts slapped an RBI single to right to make it 11-0. In the three games the guests scored 45 runs on 54 hits with 16 extra bases hits including eight homeruns, outscoring UMBC 45-17. Maine has also scored 96 runs in their nine conference games so far (almost 11 runs average per contest).
Bramanti, Knotts, and Quinn McDaniel had three hits a piece in the win. Mejia, Jenkins, and Schulefand added two each. Brett Erwin (1-3) would go 5.0 innings allowing no runs on four hits with three walks and seven strikeouts to notch his first victory of 2022 on the hill. Myles Nicholson had two hits to lead UMBC in the loss. Keegan Leffler (1-3) took the pitching defeat allowing eight runs (three earned) on seven hits in just 2.1 innings. The Retrievers fall to 12-15, 4-5 in America East. Maine returns home to battle NJIT in a three game series that begins Friday at 4 p.m. at Mahaney Diamond in Orono. The Highlanders also own a 7-2 conference record so far this season.
On Long Island, the Maine softball team trailed Stony Brook 5-1 in the bottom of the fourth inning in the rubber match of the three game series before the rain came and washed out the contest. The game will not count, and the teams will settle for the weekend split from the two games on Saturday.
Maine is 5-24 on the season (1-1 in America East) and are scheduled to play a non-conference doubleheader at Providence on Wednesday afternoon.
BASEBALL BOX SCORE
UME 1 1 9 1 1 0 0 0 0- 13 17 5
UMB 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1- 2 7 2
WP- Erwin (1-3) LP- Leffler (1-3)
HR- Jenkins 2, Schulefand, Bramanti
2B- Goodman, Schulefand, Nicholson, Cilio
SB- Schulefand 3, McDaniel, Knotts
LOB- UMBC 13, Maine 11
