For seven innings Friday night at Riders Field, the RoughRiders had made a thin offensive night survivable. Cole Stasio and Austin Roberts kept Wichita scoreless, working around early traffic and turning a four-hit game into a late-inning test of patience.
Four batters in the eighth changed all of it.
Porter walked Jake Rucker, Brandon Winokur and Garrett Spain to open the inning, filling the bases for Andrew Cossetti. The Wichita catcher got a pitch he could lift and did not leave much doubt, driving a grand slam to left-center field for his 16th homer of the season. The swing accounted for every Wind Surge run in a 4-1 Wichita win over Frisco.
It was the kind of loss that makes the first seven innings feel smaller than they were. Stasio opened with three scoreless innings, allowing no earned runs with two strikeouts and two walks. Roberts followed with a scoreless fourth, striking out two after Kyle DeBarge doubled and Jay Thomason was hit by a pitch. Porter then gave Frisco three clean-looking innings of his own before the eighth got away from him.
Porter took the loss after allowing four earned runs in 3.2 innings, with four strikeouts and four walks. Thomas Ireland got the final out of the eighth and worked a scoreless ninth, finishing 1.1 innings with two strikeouts and one walk.
Wichita had applied pressure before Cossetti’s swing, but Frisco kept finding a way out of it. Garrett Spain opened the second with a bunt single down the third-base line. Stasio answered by striking out Cossetti, and the RoughRiders later cut down Spain at the plate on DeBarge’s fielder’s choice. The Wind Surge put two aboard again in the third, but Stasio got Spain to line out softly to Corey Joyce.
That kept the night stuck at 0-0 while Frisco tried to solve Ty Langenberg. Perich gave the RoughRiders their first hit in the second, shooting a ground ball into right field, but the inning ended quietly behind him. In the fourth, Dylan Dreiling walked and Perich walked, putting two on with one out, before Langenberg escaped.
Langenberg held Frisco scoreless for five innings, striking out four and walking three. Paulshawn Pasqualotto followed with two scoreless relief innings and three strikeouts to earn the win.
The best Frisco swing before the ninth belonged to Dreiling in the sixth, when he lined a single into right field on a two-strike pitch. According to the broadcast, it extended his hitting streak to 14 games, the longest by a RoughRiders hitter this season. Dreiling finished 1-for-3 with a walk.
The rest of the offense mostly belonged to Perich. He went 2-for-3 with a double, a walk and Frisco’s lone run, reaching three times on a night when both teams finished with four hits and no errors.
His final hit gave the RoughRiders a last bit of life. With one out in the ninth against Kyle Bischoff, Perich lifted a ball down the left-field line that dropped fair and skipped behind Thomason, allowing Perich to reach second with his 25th double. Corey Joyce followed by lining a single into right field, and Perich scored easily to keep Frisco from being shut out.
Joyce finished 1-for-4 with Frisco’s only RBI. Ian Moller walked after Joyce’s single, but Marcus Lee Sang popped out and Keith Jones II lined out to right to end it.
The night fit some of the late-season strain Malcolm Moore described before the game, when the RoughRiders catcher talked about handling the longest season of his career.
“Yeah, I mean, still going. So kind of as we get later in the season, I’ve never played this many games before,” Moore said. “It’s been a challenge, and kind of just going through these last three or four weeks, it’s just, hey, how can I continue what I’ve been doing?”
For most of Friday, Frisco’s pitching had enough answers to keep the game there for the taking. The eighth inning made the margin feel sudden and final: three walks, one swing, and a scoreless game gone.