Miners take lead in ABL first-round playoff series

PALMER — In their regular season finale Wednesday night, the Mat-Su Miners took Hermon Brothers Field as temperatures hovered in the 70s.

As Mat-Su opened postseason play less than 24 hours later, it was a far different scene at the Palmer ballpark. The temperature dipped into the low 50s, and rain turned from a trickle to a pour.

But the Miners didn’t let a little wet weather slow them down. Angelo Armenta and Levi Jordan each hit solo home runs, and starting pitcher Connor Higgins worked his way into the seventh inning to help the Miners score a 4-1 win over the Anchorage Bucs during the opening day of the first round of the Alaska Baseball League playoffs.

“It’s been pretty cloudy the last couple weeks. You’ve got to expect anything,” Armenta said after the win.

Armenta used his third-inning blast to help the Miners grab an early lead in the game, and the best-of-3 first-round series against the Bucs. The Miners can clinch the series with a win in Game 2, scheduled for Friday at 2 p.m. at Hermon Brothers. A third game, if necessary, would follow 45 minutes after the conclusion of Game 2.

“I got it pretty good. I thought it had a good chance,” Armenta said of the home run, his second in 26 games with the Miners.

Armenta finished with a team-high three hits in the win.

“He’s a veteran guy. It really showed tonight,” Mat-Su head coach Ben Taylor said of Armenta, a University of Southern California product.

The Miners used three straight hits to plate a pair of runs in the fourth. Jordan led off the inning with a single, and Garrison Schwartz and Michael Donadio followed with consecutive doubles. Schwartz drove in Jordan, and Donadio sent Schwartz home.

Jordan added a solo blast in the fifth.

“We came out and swung the bat really well. It was a good day for us,” Taylor said.

Higgins pitched 6 1/3 innings for the Miners, scattering five hits and no earned runs. Of the 97 pitches the 6-foot-5 lefty threw, 64 were for strikes.

“He was fantastic,” Taylor said. “He gave us (6 1/3) really strong innings, competed hard in the zone, made some big pitches for us.”

Mick Vorhof and Jordan Floyd combined for 2 2/3 scoreless innings, with Floyd earning the save.

The Miners and Bucs were able to work through the wet weather in Palmer, but poor weather completely changed the other first round match up. The second-seeded Peninsula Oilers were scheduled to host the first game of their best-of-3 first-round series against the third-seeded Anchorage Glacier Pilots Thursday, but the game was rained out.

Instead, the best-of-3 series was reduced to just one game, slated for Friday at 3 p.m. in Kenai, Mat-Su general manager Pete Christopher. The winner of the Oilers-Pilots game Friday, will move on to face the overall winner of the Miners-Bucs best-of-3 series Saturday.

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman sports editor Jeremiah Bartz at sports@frontiersman.com.