Opening day finally came for the Men’s Centurion baseball team (0-1) as they hit the road to face the Glouster County Roadrunners (1-0) with bats and playoff aspirations in hand.

The Roadrunners are the 2nd ranked team in the nation and showed the Centurions why as they put on a dominant 30-2 performance led by their first basemen Kevin Neeham. Needham hit two home runs and drove in 7 runs on March 7.

Centurion coach Donald Perry had tabbed Blake Cohen as his starter for the game, but control issues haunted Cohen early and often. Cohen only lasted two innings and gave up 9 runs on 8 hits, but did strike out one.

Glouster’s starter Bill Mendek had the Centurions swinging and missing for most of the afternoon as he struck out nine over four innings and only allowed one run.

Call it a case of opening day jitters, but the Centurion bullpen of Jon Unangst, Matt Creevey, and Ryan Calabro also struggled with their control for most of the afternoon. Together they combined to allowed 19 runs, 14 walks, and hit four batters with a pitch.

The Centurion infield did not give their pitchers too much help either as they had four errors between

The lone bright for the Centurions came in the fourth inning when they were able to score two runs. Outfielder Andrew Torres reached on a Roadrunner error to start the inning and first basemen Dustin Singer followed with a double. Torres than scored on a wild pitch by Mendek and second basemen Zach Stuebling followed that up by driving in Singer on a single.

That would be it for the Centurion offense, but their outfield players of Andrew Torres, Erik Mazurkiewicz and Kris Bires played very well defensively.

After Roadrunner pitcher Chris Coneys got the last of the game, Coach Perry gave his thoughts on the game. “We played very poorly. Gloucester was much quicker and more energetic than us in all phases of the game. We clearly have a lot of work ahead of us in order to get up to their level of play. But I’m confident and hopeful that we’ll get there.”

This is a game that the Centurions will want to forget, but hopefully they learned something about that day too.