America East

America East Baseball News & Notes: Division Play Heats Up

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The crossover part of the America East Conference baseball season is now over. From now until the end of the regular season, division play will determine the four teams that will go on to play in the America East Baseball tournament in late May. As division play begins, Maine, in Division A, and Stony Brook in Division B, are in the driver’s seat. Both teams lead their division as this portion of the schedule begins. The Seawolves (15-8, 11-1 in AE), ran their winning streak to ten games with a doubleheader sweep of Lowell on Friday. Lowell snapped the streak in game one of a DH on Saturday. The streak matches the 10-game winning streak of Delaware back in 1997. Maine starts division action at 11-8, and 6-5 in the league after taking a weekend series from NJIT. Here is some of the other news from the league.

The wildest series of last weekend took place at Maryland-Baltimore County as Hartford took on UMBC. Lots of runs were scored by both teams in the series and both the Player of the Week and the Rookie of the Week are from that set of games. Hartford took game one 10-3 behind four extra-base hits and five-for-six in stolen base attempts. Game two was won by UMBC 8-3 behind a big game from Christian Easley out of the leadoff spot in the lineup. He went 2-for-5 with 4 RBI and a run scored. Easley got help from Ian Diaz who went 3-for-4 with a double and two runs batted in. On Sunday, both teams did a lot of hitting. UMBC would take both games by scoring 27 runs in the two games. The first game was a 14-6 win where they had 11 hits with five of them for extra bases. Drew Roberts had a big game one as he went 2-for-3 with four RBI and two runs scored. Game two saw UMBC (12-8, 7-8 in league play) win 13-7. They banged out 16 hits, eight for extra bases, as they took three of four from the Hawks (7-9, 7-9).

No doubt, Hartford’s bats were hot in this series, but their pitching was not so much. All 27 runs that the Hawks staff allowed on Sunday were earned runs. On Saturday, 10 of the 11 runs given up by Hartford were earned runs. When the weekend was over, Hartford’s team ERA jumped up to 6.31 as the staff gave up 37 earned runs over the weekend while UMBC now leads the league in team batting with a .301 batting average. UMBC is second in HRs with 21, and lead in doubles with 43, and Slugging at ..489%.

As mentioned above, both the Player of the Week and Rookie of the Week came from this series. The Player of the Week is Hartford senior outfielder John Thrasher. Out of the leadoff spot for the Hawks, all Thrasher did was put together a slash line of .571/.614//.1.714. He went deep five times in the series, drove in eight runs, scored nine times while stealing six bases. Thrasher did in one weekend what some players take a month to put together. Thrasher leads America East in hitting with a .439 average (25-for-57), is a perfect 19-for19 in stolen base attempts, and is slugging .895. The Rookie of the Week is Drew Roberts of UMBC. Roberts went 7-for-14 in the four games, drove in five, and scored six times. For the four-game set, Roberts was on base 59% of the time. This year, Roberts is hitting .333 (17-for-51). For both Thrasher and Roberts, this is their first weekly award.

The Pitcher of the Week is Maine’s senior right-hander Alex McKenney. He threw seven innings, giving up one unearned run in a win over NJIT. He allowed just two hits, walked one, and struck out three. McKenney was also pretty good with a bat in his hands as he went 2-for-3 at the plate in game one with two RBI. McKenney is eighth in the league pitching race with a 3-2 record with a 2.96 ERA, one complete game in three starts, and zero HR allowed in 24 innings pitched. Overall, the Maine Black Bears are second in the league with a 3.63 team ERA, 63 earned runs in 156 innings pitched.

Next week we’ll be back with more from America East Baseball.

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