Cannonballs coming: Mitch Keller throws complete game, one-hit shutout

Morgantown’s final game was rained out. They finish the season with a record of 40-35.

— Indianapolis couldn’t get on the board, wasting a strong start by Tyler Glasnow in a 2-0 loss to Durham. Glasnow went six innings, giving up just one run on two hits, one of them a solo HR. He walked two and fanned nine. His pitch count got a little high, as he threw 105 pitches, 62 of them for strikes. The other Durham run came when newly acquired Jack Leathersich gave up an RBI single to let in a runner left behind by Dan Runzler. The Indy offense consisted of seven singles and a double. Nobody got more than one hit. Indy is now down 2-0 in the best-of-five series.

— Mitch Keller faced the minimum of 27 batters in a complete game shutout as Altoona beat Bowie in their playoff opener, 2-0. Keller allowed four runners, and all were quickly erased. One of the runners reached on a single, the only hit Keller allowed, two on walks and one on an error. Of the four, two were wiped out by groundball double plays, one on a line-drive double play, and one on a caught stealing.

Keller showed a mid- to upper-90s fastball with very good control. He kept the velocity through the eighth inning, then saw it slip to the 93-95 range in the ninth. He didn’t use his curve a great deal, and even then used it sometimes to get ahead in the count rather than to get a strikeout. His change was his least effective pitch, but hitters weren’t able to square up on it.

Keller gave up leadoff walks in the second and ninth, but both were eliminated by groundball double plays. There was a one-out error on Mitchell Tolman in the sixth, but the runner was caught stealing. In the fourth, Keller gave up his only hit allowed, a leadoff single. The next batter hit a drive to deep left that Elvis Escobar tracked down. Escobar made a strong, accurate throw to first that got to the bag before the runner.

Altoona had lots of chances to score, as the Curve had nine hits and five walks. Tucker and Tolman each went 3-5, and Tucker had two doubles. The two runs scored on a two-out single by Jordan George to drive in Tucker in the fifth, and a one-out RBI single by Tolman in the seventh.