The Carthage College baseball team (6-8, 0-3 College Conference of Illinois & Wisconsin) lost all three games of its conference-opening series with Illinois Wesleyan University (8-7, 3-0 CCIW) on Saturday-Sunday, March 29-30 at Augie Schmidt Field in Kenosha, Wis. The Titans won the Saturday, March 29 series-opener, 4-2 in 10 innings, and then swept a Sunday, March 30 doubleheader, 11-3 and 13-10.
In Sunday's opening game, Illinois Wesleyan took a 1-0 lead in the second inning on a two-out, throwing error by first baseman Mike Gentile. A three-run home run by Bobby Czarnowski in the third inning gave the Titans a 4-0 lead. The Red Men got a run back in the third on an RBI-double by Nick Schmdlkofer. Illinois Wesleyan added another run in the seventh to make it 5-1.
An RBI-single by Matt Richer and an RBI-double by Schmidlkofer in the seventh gave Carthage a pair of runs, and the Red Men trailed, 5-3. A two-run homer by Jarrod Juskiewicz put the Titans back up by four, 7-3, in the eighth, and a two-run shot by Derek Idstein, also in the eighth, made it 9-3. Illinois Wesleyan scored two more in the ninth for the final, 11-3 margin.
Matt Hart (3-0) was the winning pitcher. Hart allowed three runs on 10 hits and no walks over seven innings. Josh Daniels (Sr., Elk Grove, Ill.,1-1) took the loss and gave up five runs, three earned, on nine hits, also over seven innings. Carthage's Nick Schmdlkofer (Jr., Wind Lake, Wis./Muskego) went three-for-four with two RBI.
In the nightcap, Illinois Wesleyan broke open a 2-2 game with an 11-run third inning that took over 40 minutes to play. A grand-slam home run by Nick Hahn and a two-run single off the bat of Derek Idstein were the big blows in the third frame. Carthage got back into the game with a pair of four-run innings in the fifth and sixth. Marc Mantucca connected on a three-run double in the sixth inning to cut the lead to 13-10, which turned out to be the final score.
Robert Romano, the Illinois Wesleyan starting pitcher, left the game with an apparent elbow injury with no outs in the fifth inning. Sean Coonan took over and gave up two runs without recording an out, and Nick Huskisson followed and surrendered four runs in one inning of work. The winning pitcher was Jonathan Vlk (1-0), the fourth Titan hurler, who blanked the Red Men in the sixth and seventh frames. John Munyon struck out the side in the ninth to earn his second save. Alex Newberry (Sr., Kenosha, Wis./Tremper, 0-3) took the loss by giving up nine runs, six earned, over the first two innings. Marc Mantucca (Sr., Naperville, Ill./Central) led Carthage with two hits in four trips to plate and three RBI.
The Red Men travel to Chicago on Tuesday, April 1 to play CCIW-opponent North Park University in a 1 p.m. doubleheader at the Holmgren Athletic Complex.