Miners add pair to roster

PALMER — With his team battling injuries and stuck in a midseason slump, Mat-Su general manager Pete Christopher has added a pair of players to the Miners roster.

Lubbock Christian junior Ross Blondin and Stony Brook freshman Tyler Johnson will both join the team, Christopher said on Monday.

“Normally, we don’t really go out and get guys (at this point of the season),” Christopher said. “But I had to do something. We’re battling for first.”

The Miners held on to the top spot of the Alaska Baseball League for about three weeks until a 9-1 loss to the Anchorage Glacier Pilots on Sunday.

Mat-Su also played against the Pilots in Anchorage on Monday, and will play six of their next seven on the road. That stretch includes five games in four days at the Peninsula Oilers in Kenai.

“We’ve got a big five-game series coming up,” Christopher said.

Mat-Su has faced its share of injury woes this season. Arkansas freshman catcher James McCann had to leave before playing an official game with the Miners. Pitchers Clayton Ehlert and Ryan Cole are on the team’s disabled list, Christopher said, and the staff is also made up of other pitchers with sore and tired arms.

Mat-Su also lost a pair of starters early this month when infielder Blake Newalu and outfielder D.J. Gentile opted to leave Alaska early. Gentile has since been signed by the Corvallis Knights of the West Coast League.

Christopher hopes Blondin can help fill the void created by the loss of Gentile, who was hitting .345 when he left. Blondin, a teammate of Miners pitcher R.L. Eisenbach at Lubbock Christian, crushed the ball as a junior, hitting .438 with 25 home runs and a team-high 99 RBI.

Blondin started all 60 of LCU’s games, and finished the season with a .922 fielding percentage. The 6-foot-3 native of Sonoma, Calif., will be another left-handed hitter in the Mat-Su lineup.

Johnson, a 6-foot right-hander, finished 5-3 with a 5.32 earned run average. Johnson fanned 58 hitters in 64 innings, he started 10 games, made 13 appearances and recorded three complete games.

Johnson is a teammate of Mat-Su infielder Chad Marshall at Stony Brook.

Contact Frontiersman sports editor Jeremiah Bartz at sports@frontiersman.com.