Bo Naylor's inside-the-park homer caps Clippers' wild walk-off win

Bo Naylor turned Huntington Park into a track meet, circling the bases for an inside-the-park, two-run walk-off homer that gave the Columbus Clippers a 9-8 win over the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders in the first game of Friday’s doubleheader. The finish capped one of the wildest games Minor League Baseball said it had seen in recent memory at the ballpark, and it arrived after Columbus had already survived a near-ending defensive gem, a late three-run deficit and an eighth inning that seemed to put the game out of reach.

The Clippers were inches from winning in the bottom of the seventh, when Kody Huff launched a deep drive to left-center. Kenedy Corona went all-out, making a diving catch at the warning track to keep the game tied at 5-5 and force more baseball. Columbus then tied it anyway when Joe Lampe, whose first home run of the season came in the bottom of the seventh, brought the game level and gave the home dugout life after a tense stretch that could have gone either way.

Scranton/Wilkes-Barre looked ready to take control in the top of the eighth, stringing together an 8-5 lead that should have been enough to close the door. Instead, Columbus answered immediately. Dayan Frias singled in a run to cut the gap to 8-6, Lampe followed with a sacrifice fly to make it 8-7, and the Clippers kept the inning from becoming a dead end long enough for Naylor to finish the job in the extra frame with the kind of chaos that rarely shows up even in Triple-A.

Tommy Mace picked up the win, while Rafael Montero was charged with the blown save and the loss. The victory pushed Columbus to 40-31 and dropped Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to 35-36, a swing that mattered in a first-half race where every late-inning answer carries extra weight. The clubs were meeting in a six-game series in Columbus from June 16-21, and MLB Network was set to televise Saturday night’s game live. Earlier in the set, the RailRiders beat Columbus 3-1 behind Brendan Beck’s nine strikeouts, but Friday’s opener belonged to the Clippers, who won by surviving everything the game threw at them and then ending it with one final, headlong sprint.