ENDWELL, N.Y. – Cortland scored 12 unanswered runs over its final five innings as the nationally eighth-ranked Red Dragons rallied to defeat Penn St. Abington, 14-5, at Maine-Endwell High School.
Cortland (2-2-1) finished with 17 hits, including five players with multiple-hit games. Marcos Perivolaris (Mattituck) went 3-for-4 with a double and an RBI. Colin BeVard (Syracuse/West Genesee) was 2-for-3 with a homer, two walks, two RBI and four runs scored and Scott Giordano (Croton-on-Hudson/Croton-Harmon) finished 2-for-6 with a homer, double, three RBI and two runs. Danny Coleman (Saratoga Springs) and Wyatt Myers (Chittenango) each finished 2-for-4 with a double. Coleman drove in two runs and Myers has one RBI.
Joe Rizzo and Zach Morales each went 2-for-4 with a walk and RBI for Penn St. Abington (1-3), which finished with eight hits.
Mitchell Cavanagh (Oneida), the third of five Cortland relievers, earned the win with three and two third innings of two-hit shutout ball. He struck out five and walked two. Isiah Hudson (Hyde Park/FDR) pitched a perfect seventh and eighth innings with two strikeouts and Liam Krasney (Greenville) tossed a scoreless ninth. Steven Salisbury (Cranston, RI/Moses Brown) entered in relief of starter Ryan Flansburg (Queensbury) in the first inning. Salisbury gave up two hits and one unearned run with one strikeout in an inning and two thirds.
The Nittany Lions scored all of their runs in their first three at-bats to take a 5-2 lead. Rizzo singled in a run and Paul Woodley hit a sac fly in the first to put Abington up 2-0. Cortland tied the game in the bottom of the first on an error that allowed a run and a Perivolaris RBI single, but the Nittany Lions scored in the second on Morales' RBI single and two in the third on a Brett Guaglionona RBI single and a Jaden Himmelreich squeeze bunt.
Cortland plated five runs in the bottom of the fourth on two-run doubles by Giordano and Coleman and a Myers run-scoring single to take a 7-5 lead. BeVard's two-run homer in the sixth made it 9-5, and the Red Dragons broke the game open with a five-run eighth that featured a Giordano solo homer, a Zachary Pruden (Binghamton/Seton Catholic) RBI double, and RBI singles by Brian Corporan (Bronx/H.S. for Environmental Studies), Andrew Michalski (Buffalo/St. Francis) and Mike O'Connor (Buffalo/North Tonawanda).
Cortland will travel to Johns Hopkins University next weekend for three games at the Baltimore Invitational. The Red Dragons will face 19th-ranked La Roche Saturday at 12:45 p.m., followed by the host Blue Jays at 4 p.m. Saturday and Rutgers-Camden Sunday at 11 a.m. Johns Hopkins and Rutgers-Camden are both among the "others receiving votes" in the preseason D3baseball.com poll.