The Amarillo Sod Poodles (25-22, 61-54) defeated the Tulsa Drillers (28-19, 74-42), 4-1, in 10 innings on Wednesday night at ONEOK Field. After struggling to push runs across after the first inning, Amarillo’s pitching held firm before a three-run top of the tenth led to a 12th Sod Poodles victory in extra innings this season.
Opponents have yet to find an answer for Avery Owusu-Asiedu’s bat, who after a two-RBI effort in Tuesday’s series opener, opened the scoring on Wednesday with a solo home run to the opposite field in the top of the first inning.
Soddies starter David Hagaman was solid across the first three innings of the game, but self-inflicted wounds by the defense allowed Tulsa to scratch across the tying run in the bottom of the fourth. After a leadoff single and fielder’s choice, Kole Myers advanced to second base on a disengagement violation and moved up to third base on a wild pitch, later scoring on a sacrifice fly by Elijah Hainline.
Amarillo created traffic on the bases throughout Zach Root’s 4.0 innings pitched for Tulsa, but a runner was caught stealing in each of the southpaws last three trips to the mound to help eliminate any scoring threats.
Both teams had gone to their bullpen by the end of the fifth, where Josh Grosz stranded runners in scoring position in each of his two innings of work and Tayler Montiel managed to escape the bottom of the seventh unscathed after allowing the first two Drillers batters he faced to reach. On the other side, Carson Hobbs tossed 3.0 no-hit innings of relief as the game remained in a 1-1 tie heading into the eighth.
Superb relief pitching took game to extras as the Soddies navigated more Tulsa baserunners with Sawyer Hawks and Carlos Rey on the bump. Hawks was called upon after Myers led off the bottom of the eighth inning with a single, but sat down the next three batters to maintain the tie. Hawks continued his perfect outing and recorded the first out of the ninth before Rey came in to face Dodgers top prospect Josue De Paula in a left-on-left matchup. The southpaw caught De Paula looking for the second out before inducing a flyout to send the game to extras.
In the top of the tenth, the Soddies faced off against Kelvin Ramirez for the second straight night, which was a welcome sight for the batting order. Junior Franco yanked a go-ahead double inside the right field line on a first-pitch fastball to score Alberto Barriga as the placement runner before Trent Youngblood crushed a two-run homer to put Amarillo up 4-1.
