Minot, N.D. – The Duluth Huskies (19-25, 3-6) posted their best road series of the season against the Minot Hot Tots (18-28, 5-5), earning their first series win. The Duluth bats went nuclear on the road, posting their two highest run totals of the year, with a 17-1 victory on Sunday followed by a 15-12 nail biter on Monday.
Game one, Sunday July 12th
Owen Marsolek got the ball for the first time this season, and retired the first ten batters he faced, setting the stage for the Huskies to strike in the third.
Jack Ryan began the scoring by pulling a home run to left, and Kayden Campbell pushed across another run by beating out an infield hit. Campbell crossed the plate on a long Dax Hardcastle homer to the pull side. That shot took the score to 4-0, Huskies.
Duluth added six more in the following frame, with Ryan knocking his second homer of the day to right-center, and Hardcastle responding in kind with an opposite-field, three-run shot. In between, Jalen Smith had punched a single to center to drive in a run. The crooked number gave the Dogs a 10-0 edge.
Back-to-back hits for Minot allowed the Tots to scratch a run across against Marsolek, but relievers Jude Sundquist, Devin Costa, and Devin Doyle kept the North Dakotans off the bard for the remainder of the game. Two run-scoring wild pitches, a Brayden Smith double, and back-to-back homers for Waylon Walsh and Benji Kautto wrapped up the scoring.
Campbell recorded three hits and two runs. Hardcastle’s two homers netted him five RBI. Walsh recorded two knocks, two walks, and three driven in. Ryan became just the second Husky to record three extra-base hits in a game, doubling and homering twice with three scored and three driven in.
Marsolek tossed 5.0 one-run innings, walking none and fanning six. Sundquist threw 2.0 hitless, scoreless innings. Costa struck out three Tots in his inning of work, and Doyle finished with a scoreless ninth.
Game two, Monday July 13th
Duluth set the tone for the game in the top of the first, scoring two runs. Jalen Smith broke the 50-RBI plane with a two run single to get the game going. Minot responded in the bottom half with an RBI double from Micah McCoy to cut the lead in half, and both teams were off and running.
The second frame was the best for both starters, with Mason Pound for Duluth and Jaden Davis for Minot posting matching zeroes. It would be the only inning that neither team scored until the eighth.
The Huskies plated two more in the third after loading the bases with no outs, but the Tots got the last chuckle in the inning. Drew Reaves popped a three-run, game-tying home run off Pound, evening the game up at four.
Duluth continued the offensive juice in the fourth and fifth, pushing across two more runs in each inning. Isaiah Ibarra, Benji Kautto and Maddox Monsour all picked up hits to start the fourth, with Ibarra scoring on the Monsour single and Kautto following suit on a Kayden Campbell RBI groundout. The fifth saw the Huskies string three consecutive hits together once more, this time going Waylon Walsh double to Andrew Ermis RBI double and Ibarra returning the fourth inning favor with an RBI knock of his own. Minot picked up one run on reliever Ben Llewellyn in the fifth, his first run allowed in his last seven innings, but the score was 8-5 Dawgs after five.
The offense went off the rails in the sixth. Duluth launched three homers in the inning and scored six runs, all with two outs to take a 14-5 lead. First it was Walsh blasting a three-run bomb, his third in as many days. Ermis went back-to-back two pitches later for his first of the season and after an Ibarra single, Kautto hit his second of the series and third of the season.
Minot didn’t go away without a fight though, scoring six of their own in the bottom of the sixth to shrink the lead back to three. Alex Altmann blasted a two-run shot to get things started for the Hot Tots, and some sloppy Duluth defense plated another two runs before Sohrab Rezaei’s two run double got the game back within striking distance.
Duluth added another in the top of the seventh on a third Smith RBI, but the next few innings went quietly until the bottom of the ninth. Trailing by four, Minot got their first baserunners in three innings against Brent Godina, scoring one on a sacrifice fly from Joe DuSell. With runners at first and second and one out, Devin Costa became the first Husky to pitch on back-to-back days all season long, hitting one batter but retiring the other two to earn his first save of the season and third of his Huskies career.
Amongst a bevy of impressive offensive outputs (there were 27 runs and 32 hits in the game), seven of nine Duluth starters had multiple hits, led by Campbell’s four hit game and Ibarra’s three hit day. Walsh led the way with four RBI, and the league leader Smith added three of his own, while Duluth powered three homers in a game for just the fourth time all year. For Minot, Isaac Huettl had three hits and Rezaei, McCoy and John Freitag all had multiple hits as well.
Brent Godina was the best pitcher for either side in the game, working two perfect innings and pitching into the ninth. However, it was Michael Zunker who earned the win for Duluth, his first of the year. Davis took the loss for six earned runs in four innings as the starter, but it was Ayden Sauerbrei who allowed eight runs in two innings including the massive six-run sixth for the Huskies.
On Deck
Duluth returns home for a two game series with the division-leading Rochester Honkers, followed immediately by two road games at Rochester. Tickets for Huskies home games can be found online on the team website and all Huskies game action can be watched on FloSports.