That wasn’t idle talk. Not when you are riding the confident highs of a nine-game winning streak.
The Dragons almost had the last laugh. Fransen entered in relief of Mason Pelio down 3-0 and allowed only one inherited runner to score in a bases-loaded, no-outs situation in the fourth inning. The Dragons rallied from that four-run inning to force extra innings.
“We’ve just got a good mojo right now, and we’ve got belief in this team,” O’Donnell said.
But the best of mojos hiccups now and then, even for first-place teams playing almost .700 baseball for the past two months. In the 10th, Cedar Rapids scored three runs, the Dragons hit the ball hard but didn’t score, and the Dayton winning streak ended at nine games in a 7-4 loss at Day Air Ballpark.
“We don’t ever think we’re out of the game,” Dragons manager Vince Harrison Jr. said. “We’re not going to allow ourselves to do that – we got to keep fighting.”
Down 4-0, the Dragons fought together on the mound and at the plate. In a familiar refrain of the winning streak, Fransen pitched three more scoreless innings, and Simon Miller struck out four in the eighth and ninth.
And the bats made hard contact.
Leading off the bottom of the fourth, O’Donnell homered to straightaway center for the second straight night for his ninth of the season. Then Cam Collier singled and Leo Balcazar tripled to cut the Kernels’ lead in half. Collier homered in the sixth, his 19th of the year and fourth in two nights (he hit three on Friday). And O’Donnell struck again in the seventh with a two-out RBI single that tied the score.
Miller, who entered the game with a 1.19 ERA over his first 13 appearances as a Dragon, didn’t quite have it in the 10th. A leadoff double plated the free runner from second base, and a two-run homer by Nate Baez put the Dragons in a three-run hole.
The Dragons’ Trey Faltine, who entered the game in the fifth inning after Allen II was ejected for arguing a called strike three, ripped a line drive right at the shortstop that easily doubled Hector Rodriguez off second. O’Donnell followed with a hard line drive for his third hit, but Collier flied out to the wall in left to end the game.
“It’s baseball – it was a hell of a game,” O’Donnell said. “Got in the hole early, tried to pick up Mason. We just got unlucky there at the end.”
The Dragons maintained their 4 1/2-game lead over West Michigan in the Midwest League East Division with 13 games left. The Dragons host West Michigan for six games this coming week. Then they finish with six games at Great Lakes, which is in third place and five games back.
“We have to keep going to get what we deserve and what we earn,” Harrison Jr. said. “We’ve earned the right to be in the spot. Nobody’s going to give us nothing. We’ve got to go get it.”
The Dragons have plenty of hitters — O’Donnell, Collier, Balcazar, Allen II, newcomer John Michael Faile — to be able to hold first place and earn their first playoff berth since 2017.
“They’re figuring out who they are,” Harrison Jr. said. “It’s different guys every day. There’s no secret to it, other than them trusting the plans and approaches.”
O’Donnell is hitting .359 with five homers over his past 25 games to raise his batting average to .260.
“Ethan is really trusting him self, staying in the middle, backside, and he’s hitting some balls good giving him an opportunity to swing at better pitches and get off better swings,” Harrison Jr. said.
Collier was the league’s player of the month in April, slumped into the .220s, and has bounced back to .256 and reignited his power over the past 20 games.
“He’s just swinging at better pitches, being more competitive when he falls behind,” Harrison Jr said. “He’s just doing everything he can to help us win. That’s what we’re asking the guys to do is battle. They got to continue to not give in.”
TUESDAY’S GAME
West Michigan at Dayton, 7:05 p.m., 980
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