Ducks' five-game winning streak snapped by FerryHawks
The Ducks' Tzu-Wei Lin returns to the dugout at the end of the seventh inning against the Staten Island FerryHawks in an Atlantic League game at Fairfield Properties Ballpark on Sunday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Coming back to win is hard to do, though the Ducks made it look routine before Sunday night.
The Ducks fell behind early in an 11-5 loss to the Staten Island FerryHawks at Fairfield Properties Ballpark and had their five-game winning streak snapped. They trailed in four of those five wins.
“It’s tough to win games when you fall behind fast like that,” manager Wally Backman said. “It’s not easy to do it every day. You can’t expect your offense to score 10 runs every day.”
The Ducks went 2-for-8 with runners in scoring position, left nine on base and scored all their runs in the final three innings.
Joe DeCarlo singled up the middle to drive in Wilson Ramos in the seventh inning for the Ducks’ first run. Ruben Tejada scored on a sacrifice fly by Sam Travis in the eighth and Tzu-Wei Lin hit a three-run home run to leftfield in the ninth.
“It’s tough to come back and there are nights where we do, we get the next guy to the plate and we start to get the ball rolling a little bit,” DeCarlo said. “Any time you’re down big early and you’re having a tough time stringing good innings together, it’s an uphill climb.”
Ducks starter Scott Harkin had a season-high eight strikeouts but allowed eight runs and 11 hits, including three home runs, in five innings.
Matt Winaker put Staten Island ahead in the second inning with a three-run homer to left-centerfield.
The FerryHawks’ Roldani Baldwin cleared the left-centerfield fence in the fourth, hitting a two-run homer, before a throwing error put Staten Island ahead 6-0.
Angel Aguilar hit two solo homers for Staten Island, one in the fifth and one in the eighth.
The Ducks, who remained a half-game ahead of York for first place in the Atlantic League North Division, will host Staten Island in the finale of a four-game set Monday before traveling to Lancaster and Southern Maryland for a six-game road trip.
“Nights like tonight happen, it’s baseball,” DeCarlo said. “Some weird things happen in baseball, but our club is headed in the right direction.”
