Pitt baseball defeats Youngstown State in rain-shortened game, 5-3

Pitcher Collin Liberatore (32) picked up his third win of the season against Youngstown State on Tuesday night. Photo Courtesy of Linsey Fagan

Mother nature may have erased five runs off the Pitt baseball team’s stat sheet, but she arrived too late to wipe out the Panthers’ win.

Pitt (25-19 overall, 10-13 ACC) returned home after a successful weekend at Notre Dame with a rain-shortened 5-3 victory over the Youngstown State Penguins (11-32 overall) at Charles L. Cost Field on Tuesday night.

Junior Nick Yarnall got things going early for the Panthers with a two-run home run in the bottom of the first, his team-leading 10th homer of the season.

First-year right-hander Collin Liberatore (3-1) got the start for Pitt and picked up right where he left off in a win over Maryland Eastern Shore last week. Liberatore shut the Penguins down with 3 ⅓ scoreless innings before reliever Jextin Pugh replaced him in the top of the fourth.

RBI singles by senior Ron Sherman and junior Jacob Wright helped the Panthers take a 5-0 lead into the fifth, but Youngstown State promptly responded.

To say Pugh struggled with his control in the top of the fifth would be an understatement.

The junior right-hander plunked two batters and threw three wild pitches before sophomore Isaac Mattson replaced him out of the bullpen for the Panthers. Mattson threw a wild pitch of his own, allowing a third run to score, but induced a groundout to end the inning.

Pitt put five more runs up in the bottom of the fifth without recording an out, but a rainstorm forced the game to be called early. Though the five-run inning didn’t count, the game counted as an official 5-3 victory for the Panthers because it was at least halfway complete.

Pitt hosts the rival Penn State Nittany Lions at Cost Field on Wednesday, May 11 at 6 p.m. Penn State shut the Panthers out in State College, 7-0, on April 5.

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