Diamond Dawgs miss playoffs after dropping four straight

In a wild flurry of seven final games trying to catch up to the rest of the Florida Collegiate Summer League, the Winter Park Diamond Dawgs managed to pull off a three-game winning streak. They also lost all of the other games.

The Dawgs needed a comeback in what would become a 10-4 win Friday night, which they would engineer with the help of three homeruns from A.J. Makarewicz, Jonah Girand and Jack Gonzalez. Despite striking out three times, Girand managed to bat in the most runners, with three RBI. Tyler Homer blasted his sixth double of the year.

That Friday night win was the third in a row for the Dawgs, who hadn’t won three games in a row all season, and hadn’t won consecutive games since June. It was also the biggest margin of victory the Dawgs had experienced since a surprise 9-2 win over Sanford on July 13.

Two days after their final win of the regular season, won with outfielder Josh DeBacker on the mound, the Dawgs (17-25) lost 16-3 to the regular season champion that had led the league for all but one week of 2016.

In that crushing end to their season, the Dawgs allowed 12 hits and watched the Sanford River Rats (27-16) pour on all 16 of those runs in just the first four innings. That may be because the Dawgs platooned four position players on the mound, with Mark Castellucci leaving his usual role of catcher to surrender eight runs. Outfielder and infrequent relief pitcher Jacob Silverstein struck out four batters in 3.1 innings of work, becoming the only Dawgs improvised pitcher of the night to not surrender a run.

The Sanford River Rats (27-16) cruised through their final game on the tail end of a four-game winning streak. The DeLand Suns (20-20), who had been threatening to upend the league for the previous week, fell apart just as they closed in on the Rats, losing four in a row to end the season.

The Winter Garden Squeeze, who lost seven of their final 10 games, didn’t manage to lose enough to fall below the Dawgs in the league standings. Because of that, the Dawgs, who have more FCSL championships than any team, won’t be in the playoffs this season.

In the final weekend of the season, the Altamonte Springs Boom, who led the league for the first three days of the season, surged back to within four games of the Rats, but couldn’t manage to outlast the league’s longest winning streak.

On Wednesday at press time the Rats played the winner of a Winter Garden Squeeze vs. Leesburg Lightning first-round playoff play-in game. They’ll continue that three-game series at 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday.