Chargers Split Pair of Tight Contests With South Suburban

  Aaron Frey
  Thursday, April 13, 2017 8:17 PM
  Athletics

Galesburg, IL

The Carl Sandburg College baseball team and South Suburban each broke through in the late innings of a tie game to split a doubleheader Thursday afternoon at the William “Bill” Hungate Baseball/Softball Complex. South Suburban scored twice in the fifth inning of Game 1 for a 7-5 victory, while the Chargers took Game 2 2-1 behind a run in the bottom of the sixth.

Knotted at 1 in Game 2, Payton Hartbank (Mattoon, Ill./Mattoon) led off the sixth with a double to center and moved to third on an error by the Bulldogs’ pitcher. He scored the go-ahead run when Marty Mennenga (Rantoul, Ill./Paxton-Buckley-Loda) followed with a groundout to third.

The manufactured run for the Chargers (17-13) made a winner of Levi Brening (Coon Rapids, Minn./DuQuoin), who didn’t allow a hit through 4 1/3 innings in winning his third straight game and improving to 6-1 overall. He completed the sixth having allowed only an unearned run on two hits and two walks while fanning three.

Cody Marquith (Knoxville, Ill./Knoxville) worked around a two-out double in the seventh to earn his first save of the season.

Mennenga drove in the Chargers’ other run with a two-out single in the third to open the scoring. Brening went 2 for 3 at the plate in addition to his work on the mound, and leadoff man Nolan Ard (Carthage, Ill./Illini West) also had a pair of hits for Sandburg.

The Bulldogs took advantage of five Chargers errors in the opener to come back from a 5-3 deficit. Two of those miscues came in the fifth as South Suburban scored twice to break a 5-5 game.

Seven Chargers each had one hit in the opener, with Hartbank’s first-inning double being the only one that went for extra bases. Harbank, Mennenga, Shane Coleman (Abingdon, Ill./Abingdon-Avon) and Tyson Nylin (Keithsburg, Ill./Mercer County) each drove in a run for Sandburg in the opener.

The Chargers will jump back into Arrowhead Conference play with a doubleheader at noon Saturday at Illinois Valley.