By Joshua Koch
Blue Sox Media Director

The Blue Sox walked out of MacKenzie Stadium on Tuesday night with a feeling they haven’t known in a while – defeat.

Entering the game Holyoke (6-2) was demolishing opposing pitching staffs scoring 32 runs in the past three games, but Mystic pitcher Alex Norris would have something to say about that.

Norris shut down the Blue Sox allowing only one run, striking out seven in his six inning performance, and was followed up by Craig Schlitter who threw three innings and struck out four of his own to close out the game.

“Definitely liked to have that out of our pitching staff,” Mystic coach Ray Ricker said about his pitchers. “I mean they did a great job getting ahead early, commanding the strike zone and getting these guys to swing early in the count.”

The Schooners struck first in the second inning after Nick Ferraresi doubled to lead off the inning, he was driven in by John Murphy’s RBI double to take a 1-0 lead and they would add one more.

Holyoke responded in the bottom of the second inning with a Trey Mancini solo home run to cut the Schooners lead in half, 2-1.

That would be the last run the Blue Sox would score as the Mystic pitching staff dominated the rest of the game allowing four hits for the entire game.

Blue Sox pitcher Chris Jenkins, who came in and threw three innings of relief allowing one run to score, said they just have to forget this game ever happened and move on.

“Get a good night’s sleep, wake up, pretend like it never happened I think is the best thing to do,” he said. “We’ve got way to much talent on this team not to put runs every game and swing the bat well.”

The Schooners extended their lead in the fourth inning with three consecutive singles allowing Joe Hudson, Christian Griffith and Brett Doran to score. Doran finished the game 1-for-5 with two runs driven in.

The Schooners would add one more in the seventh to take the 6-1 lead, which was the final.

Blue Sox starting pitcher, Kyle Hooper, was tagged with the loss and Norris claimed his first victory of the season.

The Blue Sox will be back in action tomorrow against the North Shore Navigators at 6:30 p.m., and Blue Sox head coach Darryl Morhardt said he gave a speech to his team after the game and talked about a lot of things, but mainly them controlling their own destiny.

“We talked about one pitch at a time, got to focus and I think we let the game run into our focus and we let the circumstances of the game dictate the way we played the game, and you can’t do that” he said. “You have to focus one pitch at a time up on the mound, in the field, at the plate. You have to block everything out and just do your job.

“We didn’t do that tonight, and we start doing that tomorrow it snowballs.”