ONONDAGA COUNTY – With his bat and with his left arm, Bryce Zicaro made sure the Cicero-North Syracuse baseball team did not get dragged into another extra-inning epic with Baldwinsville.
Zicaro emerged as the decisive factor in the Northstars’ 4-3 victory over the Bees Saturday afternoon, driving in the go-ahead run and then recording the last three outs pitching in relief of Jacob Crystal.
This game’s importance was enhanced by what took place seven days earlier at the Gillette Road complex, when B’ville outlasted C-NS 5-4 in 12 innings, ending the Northstars’ eight-game win streak.
Now, with the two sides having split their previous games, the winner here would not just take the season series, but take a large step toward a regular-season league title and a top seed for the Section III playoffs.
C-NS got the jump, driving B’ville starter Gavin Miller from the game in the first inning with a single and three walks that established a 2-0 advantage.
After the Bees cut it to 2-1, Jake Lukasiewicz tripled and Ty King drove him home in the fourth to restore C-NS’s margin, this while Crystal was retiring 10 consecutive batters.
But with two out in the bottom of the fifth, a walk, single and throwing error put two Bees in scoring position and Kenny Svitak’s grounder was mishandled, allowing both runners to score.
So it was 3-3 going to the top of the seventh. With one out, Mike Rockwell walked, and he went to second on a sacrifice bunt. That brought up Zicaro, whose hard grounder to third took a hop into the outfield, allowing Rockwell to race home.
It happened that Zicaro would take over on the mound in the bottom of the seventh. Throwing hard, Zicaro allowed a walk with one out, but got Kai Girard to hit into a force play and Griffin Seeber to fly out to end the game.
But the Northstars’ place atop the league standings was made more vulnerable a day later when, hosting West Genesee, it could not recover from a rough start and lost, 13-3, to the Wildcats.
Winning its fifth in a row, WG scored six times in the first inning, extended its lead to 9-0 by the second and cruised the rest of the way, with the two sides knowing they would meet again in Camillus on Tuesday afternoon.
Liverpool entered the final week of the season off getting swept by Christian Brothers Academy in last Saturday’s doubleheader, the Brothers taking the first game 2-0 and the second game 6-5.
