April 19, 2015
By: Ryan Schadewald, sports information assistant

Stats

ADA, Ohio - The 23rd-ranked Ohio Northern Polar Bears defeated the Bluffton University baseball team on Sunday, April 19, by a score of 19-6. The game was pushed up by over an hour and a half and only went six innings before Mother Nature halted the action for good. The Beavers dropped to 19-13 on the year, while ONU improved to 24-7.

The Polar Bears scored two in the first and added six more in the second, chasing starter James Watkins (Lexington) after just 1.2 innings of work. ONU’s lead continued to grow with three more in the fourth inning to take an 11-0 advantage.

Bluffton got on the board with four in the fifth stanza, including back-to-back homers from Cody Lehman (Hamilton) and Paul Shroyer (Columbus/Watkins Memorial) to lead off the inning and consecutive run-scoring doubles from Michael Alexander (Monroe) and Luke Hickey (Toledo/Whitmer) to cut it to 11-4.

However, the Polar Bears put up a seven spot in the bottom of the inning, six of them unearned, pushing the lead to 14 runs before Bluffton added two tallies in the sixth. The rains would come at the start of the seventh inning and the game was called for a convincing Ohio Northern victory.

Devin Carr improved to 3-2 on the season, while Watkins dropped his first career decision for the Beavers. Lehman and Shroyer both finished with two-hit games on top of their two runs scored in the loss.

Bluffton returns to conference play on Tuesday, April 21, as they hit the road to take on the Earlham College Quakers, a team that the Beavers lead by just a half-game in the HCAC standings. Bluffton returns home for a three-game series against the team that is tied for third in the HCAC with Earlham, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Bluffton will play two games on Saturday, beginning at 12 p.m. with a single contest on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. at Memorial Field. Come support your Beavers!

-BEAVERS-