Seton Hill tops Southern New Hampshire, advances at NCAA Division II World Series

CARY, N.C. — Thanks to a little two-out magic, the Seton Hill baseball team has advanced to the winner’s bracket of the Division II College World Series.

The Griffins scored all their runs with two men out, including the eventual game-winner in the bottom of the eighth, to outlast Southern New Hampshire, 4-3, on Sunday at the USA Baseball National Training Complex.

Coach Marc Marizzaldi’s second-seeded team earned a date with Angelo State at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the second round of the double elimination national championship tournament.

“I’m really proud of our group,” Marizzaldi said. “This was a gutsy performance. It was not a clean game by any means. Coming into this tournament, I thought it was really important to play clean and we didn’t. But we had some resilience to play through it.”

Although it took some timely hitting from Vincenzo Rauso and Isaiah DiAndreth to finish the job, Seton Hill got a little help in starting its winning rally when Tommy Pellis reached second on a throwing error by SNHU third baseman Christian Mercedes.

Rauso followed with a hard-hit single into the hole that would have scored pinch runner Carl Turner had shortstop Daniel Rivera not knocked the ball down to keep it on the infield. No one, however, was able to get to DeAndreth’s line drive up the middle that allowed Turner to score easily.

Nash Bryan, the fourth pitcher of the night for the Griffins, finished off the victory with a 1-2-3 ninth inning.

“I swung at the first pitch. I wanted to hit that one far because it was hanging,” DiAndreth said of his winning hit, which came on an 0-2 pitch. “The second pitch, a slider away, I put a horrible swing on it and I knew he was going to come again with it and he hung that one middle in. They were playing pretty deep, so I knew a low liner would do the trick.”

Seton Hill (39-6) got off to an ominous start by giving up a run in the top of the first, then having its first four batters strike out against SNHU starter Wesley Tobin.

But the outlook changed dramatically with one out in the second, when within the span of three hitters, both Rauso and Jack Oberdorf nearly hit the ball out of the park.

Rauso ended up at second with a double after his drive hit off the left field wall. He then scored when Oberdorf tripled off the wall in center.

Two innings later, Oberdorf helped ignite another rally that helped give Seton Hill its first lead of the night. His two-out single, followed by another single from Tyler Peterson, set the table for a bases-clearing double by ninth hitter Canice Ejoh.

For a while, it appeared as though the 3-1 might hold up.

Starting pitcher Jared Kollar recovered from some early difficulty to pitch three scoreless innings before being lifted after 79 pitches in the heat and humidity. Reliever Peyton Reesman followed by striking out the side in the fifth, but he ran into trouble in the sixth when the Penmen (28-8) put runners on first and second with two outs.

Reesman was replaced by Caiden Wood, who was immediately greeted with an RBI single by Michael LaRocca. He then uncorked a wild pitch that allowed Dakota Mulcay to score the tying run.

SNHU also scored all three of its runs with two outs.

“It’s never good to give up runs and when you give them up with two out, it hurts a little bit,” Penmen coach Scott Loiseau said. “When you’re a pitch away from getting out of the inning, you want to make that pitch. But you’ve got to get all three, and they did a good job of hitting with two outs.”