The Marshall University baseball team launched four homers, including No. 50 and No. 51 in the career of Victor Gomez, but Radford scored seven times in the fourth and held on to defeat the Thundering Herd, 9-7 on Tuesday afternoon at Linda K. Epling Stadium in the first game of a doubleheader. Game two was called to hellacious rain fall in the area.
Marshall (18-27) received two homers from V.Gomez, his fourth multi-homer game of his career, in a 2-for-3 day as the senior scored twice and knocked in three in the loss. Rhett Stafford (3-for-4, two RBI) launched a solo shot and Thor Meeks was a triple shy of the cycle as the Herd backstop.
Nathan Gomez added a pair of singles and James Lavinskas drew three walks in in three at bats.
In the victory, Radford (26-21) got a two-hit, four-RBI game from Ryan Burgess, including a three-run bomb.
The box score saw Brad Wimmer (3-3) even his record for the Highlanders, while Herd starter Greg Williams was tagged with the loss, dropping to 1-1 on the season. Abram Williams pitched the final two frames to pick up his 12th save of the year.
Marshall took the lead in the bottom of the second when R.Stafford and V.Gomez connected for back-to-back long balls, the first time the Herd has hit consecutive homers in 2011.
Williams had cruised through the first three frames, before falling into trouble in the fourth. Radford would score seven times off the courtesy of six hits in the stanza, including the three-run homer from Burgess to give the Highlanders a commanding five-run advantage.
In the bottom half of the fourth, the Herd answered back with a pair of runs V.Gomez’s second deep fly off the light tower in left field. Later Victor Ramos drove in a run with a RBI ground out, cutting the score to 7-4 in favor of Radford.
After Radford had extended its cushion to 8-4 off a RBI single from Zach Costello in the top half of the fifth, the Herd made the contest interesting by scoring three times in the sixth. The three-run frame was highlighted by a solo bomb from Meeks, RBI infield single from R.Stafford and sac fly from V.Gomez to make it 8-7.
That would be all the Herd offense could muster as Radford added an insurance run in the top of the seventh to round out the scoring.