Baseball: Pitt comes back to beat Akron, 11-8

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Pitt baseball was swept last weekend at Virginia Tech when the Panthers were unable to hold leads against the Hokies. Wednesday against Akron, the Zips put Pitt in a familiar situation by overcoming the Panthers’ early lead and holding an advantage through the top of the sixth inning.

The Panthers scored a pair of runs in the bottom of the sixth to tie the game, then took the lead on an RBI single off Matt Johnson’s bat. Pitt (9-10, 1-5 ACC) never gave the lead back after that and added five runs of insurance in the eighth to secure an 11-8 victory at Charles L. Cost Field.

While head coach Joe Jordano was glad to get a win, let alone play the game after rain caused a one-hour delay before the first pitch, he said his team “made a lot of mistakes today.”

“They’re not mistakes that will show up, but they’re costing us internally and that’s what we have to correct,” Jordano said. “It’s a pitch here or an at-bat or something on that base path, and those are things that are more instinctive than anything, and we’ve gotta clean it up.”

His team was able to compensate for those mistakes, though, mostly on the backs of Casey Roche and Steven Shelinsky Jr. Each player went 3-for-4, with Roche driving in a pair of runs and scoring two of his own while Shelinsky notched one of both.

Roche started Tuesday’s game against Youngstown State on the mound and didn’t get to hit. He hit cleanup Wednesday as Pitt’s designated hitter, and his team was ready to go against a familiar foe.

“Well we’ve faced them every year since I’ve been here, two or three times a year, and it’s a lot of the same arms,” Roche said. “We have a pretty good scouting report on those guys, so with the weather we weren’t sure if the game was going to go nine, so we just tried to jump on them early, jump on the fastball.”

Shelinsky’s day continues a hot streak for the fifth-year senior, who is now batting .500 (13-for-26) in his last six games with three home runs and 11 RBIs.

“I’ve been working on a lot of different things that were going wrong,” Shelinsky said. “I guess ever since I got back from being healthy I hit that hot streak and have just been rolling with it. [I’m] just trying to jump on fastballs early in the count and see where it takes me.”

The hitting performances of Jordano’s big bats allowed for his team to extend its lead late in the game and put the Pitt comeback victory away.

“Those two guys are our money guys, they’re our RBI guys,” Jordano said. “Top of the order, Stephen [Vranka] and Dylan [Wolsonovich], they gotta get on base for us and have the middle of the lineup in RBI situations. When we did have those later in the game, they delivered and that’s our game.”

Boo Vazquez provided some power, as well, with his fourth home run of the season — also his third in his last four games. Vazquez also drove in a run and finished 2-for-4 out of the No. 3 spot in the lineup.

Despite the five-run eighth, the Panthers still needed to work through the ninth when Jon Danielczyk allowed three runs to cross while recording just one out. Danielczyk entered with two outs in the sixth and worked shutout frames in the seventh and eighth, but was pulled in favor of Adam Dian, who put the final two outs of the game away and earned his first save of the season.

Danielczyk had already thrown two and one-third innings prior to the ninth, and Jordano admitted his reliever was a little “over-extended.”

“He did exactly what we wanted him to do,” Jordano said. “We wanted him to get the first out in the ninth and then we decided to stick with him rather than going to the bullpen, which turned out to not be the best idea.”

But Danielczyk (2-0) earned the win while the offense powered the Panthers ahead for good.

The Panthers opened their home schedule with back-to-back wins in games scoring 10 runs or more for the first time since 2010, which Shelinsky notes helps Pitt wash the bad taste out of its mouth after the sweep in Blacksburg, Va., and establish some good feelings heading into a weekend series against Duke.

“Going into Virginia Tech we were actually really excited, and having leads like that, then giving them up, I guess you can say it kind of hit us hard as a team,” Shelinsky said. “So coming back with two wins this week really gives us that momentum going into this weekend, which is huge.”