Omaha holds off Indianapolis 6-4 behind Cerantola's league-leading save

Elih Marrero put Omaha in command early, Luca Tresh widened the gap late, and Eric Cerantola finished the kind of tight game the Storm Chasers keep finding ways to win.

Marrero’s three-run double powered a four-run second inning that gave Omaha a 4-0 lead at Werner Park on Wednesday afternoon. Marrero later scored on an error, and for a while it looked like the Storm Chasers might cruise. Instead, Indianapolis punched back with the kind of power and pressure that can flip a Triple-A game in a hurry.

Esmerlyn Valdez cut the margin in half with a two-run homer off Omaha starter Luinder Avila, then the Indians tied it in the next inning when MLB rehabber Bailey Falter allowed a pair of runs on an RBI single and RBI double. That made it 4-4 and turned what had been a comfortable lead into a problem game, the sort that tests whether a bullpen can hold up after the starter leaves.

Omaha got the answer in the sixth. Drew Waters crossed the plate on a sequence that included stolen bases and an error, a scramble of an inning that mattered because Beck Way and the bullpen had already started to steady the game. That one run restored the lead and shifted the leverage back to the Storm Chasers, who then added a key insurance run in the eighth when Tresh led off with a home run, his first of the day, to make it 6-4.

Cerantola took it from there. After working out of a bases-loaded jam in the eighth, he finished the ninth cleanly for his league-leading fourth save. The right-hander entered the game with three saves, a 0.79 WHIP and 12 strikeouts in 6.1 innings, and the line only sharpened Wednesday: Omaha keeps winning close games because Cerantola keeps ending them. The 25-year-old Montreal native, drafted by the Royals in the fifth round in 2021 out of Mississippi State, has become the late-inning answer the Storm Chasers can trust when every pitch starts to matter.

The 6-4 win moved Omaha to 9-7 and dropped Indianapolis to 4-13. It was Omaha’s second straight victory in the six-game series, with the next matchup set for Thursday at 6:35 p.m. CT and Aaron Sanchez expected to start. The homestand has also come with extra attention around John Rave, who was named International League Player of the Week after going 9-for-19 with three doubles, two homers, 18 total bases and nine RBI against Iowa, another sign that Omaha’s offense has real bite when the margins get thin.