Brewer, relievers ace bullpen day as RailRiders top Bisons
Jun. 22—MOOSIC — Colten Brewer's day began decently enough. The Scranton/Wilkes-Barre righty shot an 86 at Scranton Country Club, finishing a few strokes behind teammate Greg Weissert.
Things got even better on his next nine.
The veteran Brewer went nine up, nine down to set the tone for a bullpen game, as the RailRiders breezed through the Buffalo Bisons, 4-1, in a tidy, 2-hour, 8-minute game Wednesday at PNC Field.
Brewer, Josh Maciejewski, Blas Castano, Michael Feliz and Weissert combined to allow just four hits and one walk while striking out 12. They got some early backing from a mammoth home run by Andrés Chaparro and the RailRiders (32-37) captured the first two games of the first-half-closing series with Buffalo.
"I feel like going quick innings like that and Chappy getting the homer in the first inning just kind of set the tone: This is going to be a quick game," said Brewer, who lowered his ERA to 1.37 in 19 2/3 innings for SWB. "This is a good-hitting team. If you just throw strikes in the right areas, you can get them to swing early, get some ground balls and a little bit of strikeouts looking. But then 'pen did great as well.
"That's everything you can ask for out of a day out of the pen."
Brewer fanned four of the nine hitters he faced and allowed just one ball to be hit out of the infield.
"He was executing his fastball, his slider, his curveball, everything," catcher Rodolfo Durán said.
Maciejewski made it 12 up, 12 down with a perfect fourth before surrendering the lone blemish of the evening. Jordan Luplow led off the fifth with a solo drive to the bridge above the RailRiders bullpen that cut it to 2-1. Maciejewski also allowed back-to-back, one-out singles that inning, but kept the lead with a strikeout and a groundout.
Castano, who was called up from Double-A before the game, got his Triple-A career off to an electric start with a perfect sixth inning that included two strikeouts. He retired the first two batters in the seventh, then allowed a single and hit two batters to load the bases, leading manager Shelley Duncan to think about bringing in the next arm. But Duncan stuck with Castano, and he rewarded him by jamming Tanner Morris on a groundout to get out of the jam.
Feliz struck out two and walked one in the eighth, then Weissert needed just 12 pitches to go three up, three down in the ninth for his first save since May 30.
"To me that was one of the best out of the bullpen that I've seen all year," Duncan said.
Chaparro, who snapped a month-long homerless drought with two in the first game of this series, found his power stroke again in the first inning against Buffalo starter Casey Lawrence, pummeling a ball halfway up the structure that supports the video board in left center for a 111.4-mph, 425-foot solo blast. In his second at-bat, he put a ball in play and hustled down the line to force a throwing error that allowed a run to score with two outs in the third inning for a 2-0 lead.
Durán led off the seventh with a double and Jamie Westbrook followed with a single to knock him home. In the eighth, Carlos Narvaez worked a two-out walk, went first to third on Durán's grounder through the right side, then scored to make it 4-1 on another RBI single from Westbrook.
"That was clean. That was absolutely clean," Duncan said of his team's play. "That one pitch, was it (a) 2-1 changeup to Luplow? Just left it too much middle of the plate, right in his honey hole. But aside from that, our guys were aggressive in the zone. They moved the ball around, different locations, kept them off balance yet in an aggressive manner. It seemed like our at-bats were a lot better today than they were yesterday. Just extremely clean."
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