Beck, RailRiders blank Worcester, snap four-game skid with 13-hit night

Brendan Beck gave Scranton/Wilkes-Barre the kind of stabilizing start it needed and the RailRiders backed it with a night of steady pressure, beating Worcester 7-2 at PNC Field to snap a four-game skid.

Beck worked six shutout innings, allowed four hits and four walks, struck out six and threw 86 pitches. For a club trying to stop a slide, it was exactly the sort of outing that resets the tone. Worcester never put together the momentum inning it needed, and Beck’s third quality start of the season kept the RailRiders in command until the bullpen handed off a lead that had already grown beyond reach.

Scranton/Wilkes-Barre started building that margin in the third, when Kenedy Corona doubled and Spencer Jones drove him in with a single. Tyler Hardman followed with a run-scoring double and Payton Henry added an RBI single, turning a tight game into a one-sided one in a hurry. The RailRiders kept traffic on the bases all night and finished with 13 hits, with Jones and Oswaldo Cabrera each collecting three.

That kind of layered production mattered as much as Beck’s line. The RailRiders did not rely on one swing or one inning; they kept forcing Worcester to defend successive threats, and the pressure carried into the fourth when Jonathan Ornelas tripled and scored on a Corona RBI hit. Jones then delivered his second RBI single after Corona stole a base, extending the gap and underscoring how well the lineup translated baserunning into immediate damage.

The offense kept adding on. Ernesto Martinez Jr. lifted a sacrifice fly in the seventh, and in the eighth George Lombard Jr. walked, Jones singled and Cabrera followed with another RBI single to widen the cushion further. By then, Beck’s start had already done the heavy lifting, but the lineup’s ability to keep scoring made the victory feel like more than a rebound night.

Worcester avoided the shutout with a two-run single by Matt Thaiss in the ninth, but the outcome was long decided by then. Zach Messinger recorded the final two outs as the RailRiders finished off a response that looked more meaningful than a one-off bounce back.

The timing mattered, too. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre had dropped its previous two games to Worcester, 6-3 on May 26 and 6-5 on May 29, after also splitting earlier May meetings with a 7-6 loss on May 5 and a 3-2 win on May 10. This time, in front of 5,654 fans on a 64-degree, partly cloudy night with a 13 mph wind blowing out to right field, the RailRiders looked like a club that had corrected something tangible. Beck, a 27-year-old right-hander drafted by the Yankees in the second round in 2021 out of Stanford, had already been named International League Pitcher of the Week for May 11-17 after a shutout outing against Syracuse, and this start fit the same profile: calm, efficient and built to stop a skid before it became something bigger.