Lake Erie Crushers News & Game Recaps

The Lake Erie Crushers have now lost a handful of consecutive games, falling to the Windy City ThunderBolts by a final score of 9-3. The Crushers (27-40) were in an early hole to the ThunderBolts (28-38) and could not surmount their divisional foes as Lake Erie is second to last in the West Division of the Frontier League.

The scoring began in the bottom of the second when Windy City scored five and split the game open. A trio of hits led to four runners touching home, before another came across on a wild pitch, making it a 5-0 game.

The Crushers would trim the deficit in the top of the fourth inning. After Jack Harris singled to right field, Kemuel Thomas-Rivera hit a two-run bomb over the left field wall. Three batters later Jackson Pritchard would launch another out of the park, again to left field and the score was 5-3 in favor of the Thunderbolts. 

That would be all the runs to come across on the board for Lake Erie tonight. The nail in the coffin came in the bottom of the seventh inning. 

Two hits and a fielder’s choice from Windy City allowed four more runs to score, which marked a 9-3 lead that was too much for Lake Erie to overcome.

Newly acquired Zarion Sharpe (0-1), who was picked up from the Minnesota Twins farm circuit, struggled in his debut with the Crushers. He went 1.1 innings surrendering five runs on four hits while walking one and punching out two. Sharpe was taking over JD Hammer’s spot in the starting rotation. Hammer was recently signed to the Los Angeles Angels organization. 

Logan Schmitt (4-2) had a quality night on the mound for Windy City, picking up the win and going 7.0 innings strong, giving up three runs on six hits en route to striking out seven and walking three. 

Sam Curtis made his first appearance off the disabled list tonight and pitched 0.2 innings without allowing a run. Trevor Kuncl and Sam Frontino followed suit, giving Lake Erie a combined 4.0 scoreless inning, 3.0 of which went to Kuncl.

Pritchard and Tromp were the only Crushers to have multi-hit games with two a piece. Thomas-Rivera had two RBIs.

Lake Erie will attempt to even the series with Game 2 tomorrow against Windy City. The first will be at 7:35 PM ET.