Unusual games have become the norm for the Brooklyn Cyclones.
In the last four days they have played a game that took five hours to complete because of rain against the Staten Island Yankees and a four-hour, 14-inning marathon versus Aberdeen, both of them wins. You can now add on to that a nearly four-hour and 45-minute contest delayed by rain with the Yankees, on a night a doubleheader was scheduled.
“Sometimes it can mess with you a little bit,” starter Mark Cohoon said. “If it’s happening a lot you start to get used to it and deal with it.”
This time the ending was different.
Yankees catcher Kyle Higashioka’s two-out RBI double in the top of the eighth gave Staten Island a 4-3 win at KeySpan Park in a game scheduled for seven innings Wednesday. The game is the first of five final games remaining between the two rivals. The second game of the doubleheader was postponed until Thursday. The teams will play two starting at 6 p.m. in Coney Island.
“Hopefully tomorrow night will be a better day for us,” Cyclones manger Pedro Lopez said. “We had our chances to break the game wide open.”
That came in the fifth against Staten Island starter Francisco Rondon, who lost his control of the strike zone. Brooklyn loaded the bases, trailing 3-2 with one out, on walks to Sam Honeck and Tyler Vaughn. Rondon threw seven straight balls before getting a called strike to John Servidio, who grounded into an inning ending 5-4-3 double play on the next pitch.
The Cyclones would tie the score in the sixth. Louis Nieves lined a two-out double into the gap in right centerfield and was moved third when Justin Garber struck out on a wild pitch by SI reliever Griffin Bailey. The right hander then uncorked another wild one two pitches later to bring home Nieves before the game was suspended for more than two hours because of a severe thunderstorm.
“If we didn’t have the rain delay we had a real good chance,” Cohoon said.
The left-hander rebounded from a rocky first inning where he gave up three runs on four hits, including two doubles and triple, to put the Cyclones behind 3-0. Brooklyn got a run in the bottom of the first on a Vaughn RBI single and in the fourth via a Centeno ground out. Cohoon retired 14 of the next 16 batters he faced, allowing five hits and striking out four over six innings to give the Cyclones a chance to rally
“After the first inning I got the ball back down,” Cohoon said. “I started getting back to the corners. I just started going one pitch at a time. I was thinking way too far ahead.”
