pitching carries baseball to cc win

Women’s Tennis Topples Ursinus The Muhlenberg women’s tennis team opened up Centennial Conference play with an 8-1 home win against Ursinus. The Mules have beaten the Bears 10 straight times, all by 8-1 or 9-0, but they had to work hard for this one. All three doubles matches were close, with Muhlenberg forced to play from behind. The No. 1 team of seniors Jenn Powell and Carly Rotfeld played a marathon, winning 9-7. Rotfeld went on to play another long match at the No. 3 singles, dropping a second-set tiebreak before winning a third-set supertiebreaker. By the time that match ended, daylight was running out and Muhlenberg had already clinched the match, thanks to straight-set wins by Powell and sophomores Caitie Druker, Sara Sutker and Danielle Winston. Click here for box score.

Phil Cresta’s left arm is where gaudy batting averages go to die.

For the second straight Tuesday, the junior pitcher on the Muhlenberg baseball team faced a

In addition to going 2-for-3, Fisher turned a 4-6-3 double play to erase a leadoff runner in the fifth and caught a sinking line drive to end the game.

potent offense and completely shut it down. Last week, he pitched seven shutout innings against a Moravian team that had a .372 team batting average. This time, the opponent was Swarthmore, which came in hitting .331.

Cresta combined with senior Matthew Ordog on a five-hitter as the Mules beat the Garnet, 4-1, in their first Centennial Conference game of the season.

It was the 26th straight win for Muhlenberg vs. Swarthmore, but this Garnet team is different from many of the ones that lost the previous 25. With five talented freshmen in the starting lineup, Swarthmore split its first 16 games, scoring at least 10 runs in six of them.

Cresta held the Garnet’s 3-4-5 batters without a hit in 10 at-bats and took a four-hit shutout into the eighth before giving up a solo home run, snapping his unscored-upon streak at 14 2/3 innings. He struck out six and left with one out in the ninth after hitting a batter.

Ordog retired the final two batters to earn his first career save.

The Mules (7-16-1) were opportunistic on offense, taking advantage of three errors to score all four of their runs. In the third, two-out hits by junior Dan Fisher and senior Eric Hammond were followed by an infield error to bring in one run. Senior Christian Conti singled in a second run.

Fisher’s RBI double in the fifth came after a dropped fly ball, and another two-out infield error plated a run in the seventh.
Click here for line score.
Click here for complete stats.