The eternal, inter-sport rivalry between SUNY Oswego and Plattsburgh State has had its latest editions and it came up all in Oswego.

The Lakers baseball team went to a neutral site in Oneonta to play a three game series against their time immemorial rivals and all three games resulted in victory for the green and gold. While the three game  sweep instilled a picture of utter domination in the mind, it was a lot closer to being a 2-1 series loss for Oswego, or even a sweep for Plattsburgh. 

Their Friday game, upon first look, appears the most conclusive victory for Oswego. 5-2 was the final score, with Daniel Winchester having the standout performance with two hits and two RBIs. But this one did not end in nine, but ten innings. The Lakers tied the game at two apiece in the eighth inning, tying a 2-1 lead that the Cardinals had had the previous four innings. When frame nine came up blank on both sides, it came down to the Laker batters up in the top of the tenth inning to break the stalemate. They broke it by eclipsing the runs they had managed in nine innings in just one. Three runs, one off of an RBI triple managed by the aforementioned Winchester.

The birds had no answer and so, game one went to Oswego. 

The next day brought a doubleheader, with two nine inning games on the docket. The Lakers started the first six innings by blanking the Cardinals, while managing to score two themselves off of wild pitches thrown by a likely shaken Isaiah Maines. This made it three unanswered runs by Oswego, including a sac fly RBI by Brendan Mair in the second.

By this point the Cardinals had to do something, so they did. Tyler Martin singled to center field, scoring Ryan Hart in the seventh inning. Hart then paid it forward in the eighth inning by singling himself, allowing Jackson Pam to score. Oswego was feeling a rally coming from Cardinal country and one man put a stop to it. 

Matthew Drillings took the mound late in the eighth inning, replacing Mason Sands who had been in the entire game to that point. Drillings kept the Cardinals’ bats soft, allowing only one man out of the six he faced to get away unscathed. Two flyouts, two groundouts and a strikeout were good enough to secure the save and secure the series win for the Lakers. 

While it was now impossible for Plattsburgh to win the series, the Lakers were clearly not yet satisfied. They had not shown the full swinging potential of their bats until now. Game three later that Saturday changed that. Their bats were quieter during the first six innings, only putting three runs on the board to the Cardinals eight, four of them scored in the bottom of the sixth. Plainly this woke something up within the Lakers, because their bats were relentless for the final three. 

Daniel Winchester was certainly living up to the firing nature of his name, batting in five runs in just two hits. Harry Uvena batted in two runs of his own and with Jordan Ynoa and Andrew Dempsey batting in an extra apiece, that totaled nine runs for the Lakers in just three innings. This shot them back up to a leading score of 12-9 by the middle of the ninth and with Plattsburgh only managing a measly two runs, the Lakers secured the series sweep and sent the birds home empty handed. 

Now sitting second in the SUNYAC with their 8-1 conference record, having won eight of the last ten, the Lakers head to New Paltz this weekend to continue their path of SUNYAC domination. We can definitely hope to see a player like Winchester bringing out the big guns again.