For the second straight game, a big first inning forced the Carson Blue Jays to play catch-up, and for the second straight game they couldn't do it.
The Reno Knights scored three first-inning runs off Casey Wolfe en route to a 4-1 win over the Blue Jays Wednesday afternoon at Ron McNutt Field in the regular-season finale for Carson.
The Blue Jays, mired in an 11-game losing streak will conclude their season next week at a wood bat tournament in Meridian, Idaho.
Despite the loss, Carson coach Cody Farnworth was upbeat for two reasons. The first is that the Blue Jays played a solid game. The second is that the Knights roster had a couple of college players on it and several players who graduated in June. Normally, area teams don't use graduated players during the summer.
Farnworth was especially pleased with Wolfe's effort. The right-hander bounced back well after Reno's first inning. In one stretch, he retired 13 of 15 batters, spanning the last out of the first to the last out of the fifth. He pitched 6.1 innings.
"I just left the ball up too high in the first inning," Wolfe said. "There was one error, but that didn't really make a difference. Reno is a good hitting team, so you can't leave the ball up.
"After the first inning, I threw more off-speed pitches and kept it low."
Garrett Hampson opened the game with a single and moved to third on Nick Bietz's single. Anthony Hascheff followed with a fly ball to deep left that Dion Copoulos dropped near the warning track, Hampson scored on the play, while Bietz and Hascheff advanced to third and second, respectively. R.J. Bush singled home Bietz and Grant Kukuk hit a sacrifice fly to right to score Hascheff.
It would have been easy for Carson and Wolfe to disintegrate, but that didn't happen. Wolfe and the Blue Jays battled until the bitter end of the nine-inning game.
"He (Wolfe) is a competitor," Farnworth said. "He competes whether he's on the mound or I put him at shortstop. He threw well.
"He threw a good seven innings his last outing (in the High Sierra Classic). He's given us a lot of good innings. It was all location. He did a better job of keeping the ball down after the first inning."
Wolfe, unfortunately, didn't get much offensive support from his teammates. Reno's Austin Smith retired the first 10 hitters before yielding a one-out single in the fourth. It was the fourth when the Blue Jays lost clean-up hitter Chance Quilling, who fouled off a ball only to see it carom back into his face. The ball hit his sunglasses, which opened a cut below his eye. He left the game and didn't return.
Carson threatened in the sixth when T.J. Thomsen singled with no outs. He moved to third on two infield rollers, but was stranded when Rory Petersen grounded to short.
Reno made it 4-0 in the seventh when Zach Paquette singled and eventually scored on a Hascheff single.
Carson finally broke through against Smith in the seventh when Charlie Banfield hit a one-out single and scored on a double to left-center field by Jace Zampirro. On the mound, Zampirro blanked Reno over the last 2.2 innings of the game.
Smith went the distance for Reno, a rarity in a summer game.
"I thought he threw well," Farnworth said. "He wasn't even supposed to start. Somebody got sick so he stepped in. He kept the ball down and let the defense work."
NOTES: Carson opens play in the Idaho tournament next Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. against Centennial (Boise) on Centennial's home field. There are two-six team pods, so each team will play five games ... Nick Domitrovich, who has been in Europe on vacation, will rejoin the team in Idaho.