By: Emily Tuttle

ROCKFORD, Ill. — The Rockford Rivets returned home, the stadium’s concourse lined with classic race cars with engines revving. The Rivets’ engines, however, stalled in an 11-4 loss to the Traverse City Pit Spitters. The Rivets gave up five runs in the fourth inning and failed to bounce back and deliver. 

As opposed to the Rivets’ hot starts the past few games, the Pit Spitters jumped out ahead first with an Ethan Guerra home run. The Pit Spitters are second in the Great Lakes East, and they only extended their lead as they also chase the first-place Royal Oak Leprechauns. 

The Rivets looked to answer back in the second inning, as Coby Neville (Paradise Valley CC) hit a leadoff single. Collin Roche (Harper CC) belted an RBI double, his first of the season, to knot the game at one. Roche’s Harper College teammate, Lewis Barbour (Harper CC), hit into a double play, but Gavin Taylor (UNLV) still came across the dish. 

From that point on, the Rivets went cold, not scoring another run until. 

The Pit Spitters went to work in the next couple of innings. Runners scored off of wild pitches and a sac fly in the third. But in the fourth, the Pit Spitters offense stepped on the gas. 

They hit five consecutive RBIs, exploding for five runs in the inning. The hit party rained on the Rivets parade, and they lived underneath the storm cloud for the rest of the night. 

Ethan McDonald (Eureka College) started on the bump for the Screws in his seventh appearance—McDonald has also been in the lineup hitting for the Rivets over the past couple of days. 

He lasted 3.1 innings and allowed eight earned runs on seven hits and three walks before Colt Armbrust (Webster University) took over. Armbrust found no similar success against the Pit Spitters, though he struck out five. His 3.2 innings helped keep traffic off the base path, but the Rivets went three up, three down in the fourth, fifth, and seventh. 

In the bottom of the ninth, the Rivets showed minimal signs of life, but it was too little, too late. Roche hit a single, his second of the game, and Beau Bloxdorf’s (University of Nebraska-Omaha) RBI single scored Neville. Roche then came home on a fielder’s choice, but the inning ended in a groundout. 

It has been a tight season series between the Pit Spitters and the Rivets thus far, with every two-game series ending in a series split. The Rivets’ four-game win streak came to a halt in a game they will look to forget before taking on the Pit Spitters tomorrow at 6:35 pm.