After a single-game win against Cornell last week, the Binghamton University baseball team dropped both games of a weekend series against Navy. The Bearcats held the lead at times in both games, but were unable to withstand two late comebacks by the Midshipmen.

“[I’m] a little disappointed with both games, we couldn’t protect the lead the way we needed to, and we couldn’t,” said Binghamton head coach Tim Sinicki. “In yesterday’s game, we couldn’t expand the lead, which would have helped.”

Binghamton (21-21, 9-9 AE) beat Navy (25-23, 14-11 Patriot) to the punch in the first game of the series on Friday. In the top of the second, the Bearcats scored two, the first from an RBI single by freshman first baseman/pitcher Steven Kraus and the second coming on a Navy wild pitch. The Midshipmen scored a run of their own in the second, before graduate student first baseman Freddy Forgione hit a two-run homer in the top of the fourth to give Binghamton a 4-1 lead.

In the sixth, Navy fought back to tie the game at 4-4. Binghamton again stretched out a narrow lead, with an RBI single by senior catcher Zach Rogacki in the seventh scoring one and an RBI triple by sophomore infielder Todd Abraham in the eighth scoring two to make the game 7-4. However, the Midshipmen scored five runs in the bottom of the eighth, walking off game one with a final score of 9-7. Sophomore pitcher Hayden Tarsia started the game, pitching 3.2 innings, allowing one earned run and striking out two.

“We just didn’t do a good job coming out of the bullpen, our guys need to execute a little better,” Sinicki said. “Coming out of the bullpen is a little bit of an art form, you’ve got to be able to have the ability and the nerve. There’s a lot of things that go into coming out of the bullpen into a critical situation.

“You’ve got to have really good focus and you’ve got to be able to execute your pitches, and I just think we failed in that area,” he continued.

The second game of the series played out similarly for the Bearcats. The only offense for Binghamton came in the top of the fourth, when Forgione launched a two-run homer to give the Bearcats a 2-0 lead. The Binghamton pitching staff could hold Navy at bay for only so long, giving up a run in the fifth and two in the sixth to give the Midshipmen a 3-2 lead. Ultimately, the Bearcats were unable to muster any more offense and dropped the final game.

Graduate student pitcher Ryan Packard started the game for the Bearcats, pitching five innings, allowing a run and a walk and striking out one. Throughout the entire weekend, the Bearcat staff pitched to a 6.18 ERA, while the hitters slashed just .231.

“We had a chance to kind of break it open early in the game and came up short,” Sinicki said. “The number of hits that you get in a game is only important if you can score runs off of those hits. It’s hard when you leave as many guys on base as we do. Sometimes, and I understand it, sometimes guys want to be so successful and they want to do something that really helps the team, they kind of just go outside of what they should be doing and make things more difficult than they need to.”

“We had a couple chances yesterday to make plays on both offense and defense to win that game, and we just didn’t do it when we needed to,” he continued. “If we want to make a good run here at the end heading into the America East tournament, we’ve got to be better than we were this weekend.”

After a matchup against Marist scheduled for Tuesday was canceled, the baseball team will be back in action on Friday, May 9 in a three-game series against Maine. First pitch is scheduled for 3 p.m. at the Mahaney Diamond in Orono, Maine.