IronPigs power past WooSox 9-3 behind balanced attack

Lehigh Valley answered Worcester’s late push with a decisive stretch of its own, turning a 3-2 deficit into a 9-3 win at Coca-Cola Park and evening the series at two games apiece. Felix Reyes sparked the turn with a single, a stolen base and a run scored, then Otto Kemp cracked his sixth homer of the season in the seventh to put the IronPigs ahead for good before the offense buried the WooSox with five more runs in the eighth.

The night started with Lehigh Valley setting the tone immediately. Christian Cairo opened with a leadoff single to extend his on-base streak to 19 games, and Keaton Anthony followed with a double down the left-field line that brought home Cairo and Kemp for a 2-0 lead in the first. Worcester clawed back in the fourth when Matt Thaiss lined a two-out single into center to score Anthony Seigler and Mikey Romero, then grabbed the lead in the fifth on Tyler McDonough’s home run.

That advantage lasted only briefly. Reyes got the response started in the fifth, taking second after his single and steal before scoring on Otto Kemp’s RBI single to tie it 3-3. King, who settled in with seven innings and four strikeouts, kept Lehigh Valley close long enough for the lineup to reclaim control, and the IronPigs never looked back once Kemp lifted the ball out in the seventh.

The eighth was the separator, and it looked like a Triple-A lineup built to pressure pitchers from every angle. Cairo singled to center to drive in Carter Kieboom, Reyes stayed in the middle of everything when a popup dropped in front of the defense and allowed Dylan Carlson and Cairo to score, and Anthony and Bryan De La Cruz added RBI singles to finish the burst. By the end, the IronPigs had spread the damage across the order rather than leaning on one bat, a useful sign for a club trying to show its depth is more than organizational filler.

Chuck King improved to 4-3 with the win, allowing three runs over seven innings, while Angel Bastardo took the loss and fell to 2-1. For Lehigh Valley, the result was more than a clean win in front of the home crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania. After dropping the first three games of the set on June 16, 17 and 18, the IronPigs finally reclaimed the tone of the series and did it with the kind of balanced attack that keeps players in view for bigger opportunities.