RailRiders fall in 10 innings after late lead changes and costly error

A two-out error in the 10th inning turned a winnable rivalry game into a 6-5 RailRiders loss Friday night at Coca-Cola Park, where Christian Cairo’s infield single and the miscue behind it sent pinch runner Dylan Carlson home for Lehigh Valley’s walk-off run. For Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, it was the kind of defeat that stings twice as much because the game was there to be won after a night full of lead changes and another big swing in a series that has been all over the place, from a 15-4 RailRiders rout on Tuesday to a 13-1 IronPigs response on Wednesday.

SWB opened the scoring in the third when Kenedy Corona walked, George Lombard Jr. ripped a double, and Seth Brown drove in Corona on a groundout. Lombard Jr. then scored on a Bryse Wilson wild pitch for a 2-0 edge, but the lead did not last long. Lehigh Valley answered in the bottom half, and Bryan De La Cruz kept hammering away at the series, launching his third homer of the matchup to give the IronPigs a brief 3-2 lead. The right-handed slugger had already homered in back-to-back games earlier in the week, and Friday’s shot kept the pressure squarely on a RailRiders pitching staff trying to survive a game that kept changing hands.

The RailRiders grabbed control again in the fourth when Lombard Jr. came through with a bases-loaded double to put SWB back in front, 4-3. Lehigh Valley nudged ahead in the fifth on a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch and a four-pitch walk to Cairo that pushed the IronPigs to a 5-4 lead. Then Yanquiel Fernández answered in the seventh with a solo homer, his fourth of the week and 13th of the season, to tie it at 5-5. Fernández, the 23-year-old left-handed hitter from Havana, Cuba, kept SWB alive. Lombard Jr., the Yankees’ No. 1 prospect and a 20-year-old shortstop promoted to Triple-A on April 29, did his part too, finishing with two hits.

The RailRiders still left too many chances behind. They stranded runners in the eighth and ninth innings, finished 2-for-15 with runners in scoring position, and left 11 on base. Carlos Lagrange was charged with the first five Lehigh Valley runs over five innings, the bullpen held the line until the 10th, and Danny Watson took the loss after the unearned winner crossed. At 25-21, SWB walked away from a game it had every chance to close out, and a series that had already flipped from blowout to blowout ended with the most avoidable loss of all.