Harwich Falls To Yarmouth-Dennis In East Finals

HARWICH – There will be no repeat championship for Harwich this summer.

A year after beating the Yarmouth-Dennis Red Sox in the East Division finals on the way to winning the Cape Cod Baseball League, the Mariners fell to the Red Sox in the same round, dropping the third and final game of the series last Sunday, ending their bid for back-to-back titles.

The Red Sox, the lowest seed in the East, took game one comfortably on the road against the two-seed Mariners in a 5-0 shutout. In game two, Harwich survived a nailbiter in extra innings played over two days, winning 7-6 to force the deciding game. Again on the road, the Red Sox handled Harwich in game three 7-1 to take the series.

Across the three-game series, Yarmouth-Dennis outhit Harwich 36-16. The Mariners committed six errors and left 17 men on base. The difference in the series overall: making plays, Harwich catcher Matt Conte (Wake Forest) said.

“They made them,” he said. “We didn’t.”

The series couldn’t have started much better for Yarmouth-Dennis. After earning a day off by sweeping the East Division-winning Orleans Firebirds to begin the postseason, the Red Sox walked into Whitehouse Field last Friday and held the Mariners to a single hit in a 5-0 win. 

Red Sox starter Clay Hendry (North Florida) went seven innings, allowing just one hit and one walk while striking out six. He also faced the minimum, inducing double plays right after surrendering the two baserunners. 

“He pitched great,” Harwich manager Steve Englert said after game one. “He was moving the ball. He was spotting up, and he was pounding the strike zone.”

Drake Frize (San Diego) threw two scoreless innings to finish the stellar evening of pitching, allowing just one baserunner in relief of Hendry. The Mariners, coming off a walk-off elimination game win against the Brewster Whitecaps a night earlier, didn’t move a runner past first base the entire game. 

“It's tough,” Engert said. “You win an emotional game last night, and you move on and then you get a quick turnaround.”

Red Sox bats, meanwhile, hit around Harwich’s Pierce Friedman (Maine), who in his previous start a week earlier had thrown six and two-thirds no-hit innings. Friedman surrendered four runs (three earned) on seven hits and two walks, striking out two in three and two-thirds innings. Ryan Reich (Seton Hall) took the rest of the game in an impressive mop-up appearance.

“They were squaring up some balls, but we stayed in it,” Englert said. “We competed. We kept it close. There were opportunities there, we just couldn't kick the door in.”

 The Harwich offense finally broke through in game two last Saturday, scoring six runs in the fourth inning and leading 6-2 after six. But against the Mariners bullpen, Yarmouth-Dennis scratched out two runs in the seventh and a run each in the eighth and ninth to tie the game. Harwich nearly melted down in the seventh, committing three errors on two consecutive batters.

With runners on first and third in the ninth inning, with the Red Sox 90 feet away from winning the series, Harwich’s Scott Doran (Coastal Carolina) entered and recorded two huge strikeouts to move the game into extras and keep the summer going for the Mariners. 

As the sun gradually began to set at Red Wilson Field (which doesn’t have lights), Doran and the Red Sox’s Tyler Pitzer (South Carolina) — the league’s 2025 winner of the BFC Whitehouse Award for Outstanding Pitcher — exchanged scoreless 10th, 11th and 12th innings. 

“I feel like that's the most fun situation, throwing in the game when it's on the line,” Doran said. 

Umpires suspended the game due to darkness at about 7:30 p.m., three and a half hours after first pitch. The teams resumed play Sunday at noon — a situation Englert said was “crazy.”

“Never seen anything like that,” he said.

The next day, Aiden Robbins (Texas), the Cape League’s batting champion this year, delivered for Harwich in the 13th, in his first game of the postseason after being sidelined with a finger injury. The Mariners had quickly put up two hits once play resumed Sunday, though Ryan Gerety (Northeastern) ran into a brutal second out in an aggressive attempt for third base that had the Harwich offense looking like it might sputter once again. 

But Robbins came through, ripping an opposite-field double that sailed over the head of Red Sox right fielder Will Baker (Georgia Tech), scoring one and giving Harwich a 7-6 lead.

“I was dying to get out there, and I knew that if one of these two games was going to be the last one, I had to come out here and just perform and do what I do,” Robbins said later that day, after game three. “I hit the ball. I run. I try and hype these guys up. I just try to do that every time.”

Tyler Muscar (James Madison) then retired Yarmouth-Dennis in order to at last wrap game two. First pitch of game three back in Harwich loomed only five hours later. 

“Mentality going in was just, fill up the zone and pick up the boys up tonight and move on to game three,” Muscar said.

The win — no doubt a resilient and gritty one grinded out over a more than 20-hour span —  would not end up being a momentum-shifting turning point of the series for the Mariners. They and the Red Sox basically had to drive right from South Yarmouth to Harwich to begin getting ready for game three after the conclusion of the 13th inning of game two.

With the deciding bout tied 1-1 after four innings, the Red Sox scored three on Harwich starter Tanner Duke (Kansas State) to take a lead they would not relinquish. The rally began with an error by shortstop Sam DeCarlo (Washington). The Mariners brought the potential tying run to the plate with one down in the seventh, but Conte flew out and Robbins was picked off at second base to end the threat. 

Josh Landry (Hope International) pitched five and a third scoreless relief innings for the Red Sox in the series-clinching 7-1 win. Across the entire series, the Mariners scored runs in just three of 31 total innings played. Yarmouth-Dennis advanced to face the Bourne Braves in the league championship.

“I got the right guys here right now, at the right time, and they’re coming to play,” Yarmouth-Dennis manager Scott Pickler said after the series win. “They wanted to be here. They wanted to get to the finals. It was fun to watch them play.”

For Harwich, the series loss brought an end to their year as defending champions, a season in which they produced the Cape’s best pitching staff by earned run average and runs allowed, best run differential plus the batting title winner in Robbins (who played for Harwich during last year’s league-winning postseason run).

“I feel like we had a great summer, and I'm happy with what we accomplished,” Robbins said. “And there's no ifs ands or buts, but it is what it is.”