Once Bitten, One Shy: Tri-City Taken Down by Late Vancouver Homer
A loud, energetic crowd saw 1B Matt Coutney of the Tri-City Dust Devils (0-1 2H) swat two home runs and drive in four but his counterpart, 1B Peyton Williams of the Vancouver Canadians (1-0 2H), have the final say in a 6-5 win for the visitors Friday night in front
A loud, energetic crowd saw 1B Matt Coutney of the Tri-City Dust Devils (0-1 2H) swat two home runs and drive in four but his counterpart, 1B Peyton Williams of the Vancouver Canadians (1-0 2H), have the final say in a 6-5 win for the visitors Friday night in front of 2,833 at Gesa Stadium, the second largest crowd of the year.
A rollicking, back-and-forth affair stood tied at 5-5 going into the 9th inning. Lefty Dylan Phillips (0-3) came on, facing Williams as his first batter. The big Iowan corner infielder turned on a Phillips fastball, lining it deep over the right field wall for what ended up the winning run.
The home team got out to an early 4-0 lead, beginning with returning SS Adrian Placencia tripling down the right field line in his first High-A at-bat of 2024 and scoring on a balk for the first run of the night in the bottom of the 1st. The 1-0 lead grew bigger in the 3rd when Coutney struck his first longball of the night, a 3-run shot over the right-center wall that scored both Placencia and CF Joe Redfield, who also made his Dust Devils return Friday.
Vancouver got to work in the top of the 4th, scoring four runs to tie the game and run Tri-City starter Walbert Ureña out of the contest. Williams inserted himself in the mix in the inning by earning an RBI via groundout that tied the game at 4-4. He then gave his team the lead in the 6th with a hard low liner that skipped through the right side, scoring 3B Jamari Baylor and giving the Canadians a 5-4 edge.
Coutney would even things again in the bottom of the 8th, crushing a pitch from Vancouver reliever Grayson Thurman (5-2) over the right field wall for his first two-homer game as a professional and tying the game at 5-5. The Wetaskiwin, Alberta, Canada native had last homered twice in a game as a member of Old Dominion University’s team on April 24, 2022, coming against a Florida Atlantic Owls team that had on its roster both current Dust Devils catcher Caleb Pendleton and Los Angeles Angels first baseman Nolan Schanuel.
Williams’s tiebreaking homer gave the Dust Devils one more opportunity to tie the game or walk off with the win, needing at least one to take the game to extra innings. Vancouver hurler Conor Larkin, though, would navigate around a RF Werner Blakely two-out single in the bottom of the 9th to finish the game, getting help from a pair of diving catches from LF Je’Von Ward and defensive replacement CF Marcos de la Rosa for the first and final outs of the 9th, respectively.
Tri-City had a total of six hits, with Coutney’s 2-for-3 with a walk the only multi-hit effort. Five of the six hits were extra-base knocks, including a pair of triples (Placencia and 3B Chad Stevens) and a double (Joe Redfield).
The two teams will meet again at 7:05 p.m. Saturday night at Gesa Stadium where postgame fireworks, presented by Columbia Basin Hearing Center, will light up the summer’s night sky following game six of the week’s seven. Right-hander Chris Clark (1-7, 5.79 ERA) heads to the mound for the Dust Devils and Vancouver will counter with righty Ryan Jennings (0-3, 1.93 ERA). Broadcast coverage of Saturday night’s game begins with the pregame show at 6:45 p.m. both here and on the MiLB app, with video coverage on Bally Live and MiLB.tv.
Tickets for the weekend's ballgames are on sale now with special ticket rates available for groups of 20 or more. For more information on Dust Devils single game, season, mini-plan (11, 22, 33) and group tickets, visit the team’s official ticketing site, dustdevilsbaseball.com.