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FGCU baseball continues historic start to season with win over Rutgers

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(EN Photo / Brad Young)

The FGCU baseball team continued its best start in program history with a 5-2 victory over Rutgers.
Coming off the team’s first ever win against the number one team in the country, No. 1 FSU on Wednesday night, The Eagles moved to 16-3 on the season with Friday night’s win.
Garrett Anderson, 2-0, pitched a career-high eight innings to pick up his second win of the season, giving up two runs along the way.
“It feels real good. There’s no lying about that or hidden truths,” FGCU head coach Dave Tollett said. “Were having a lot of fun and boy I”ll tell you what, 16-3, I’ll take it.” You can’t win the second one unless you win the first one, so Friday night’s wins are big for us, and St. Patrick’s Day, the green jerseys were good luck.”
The Eagles raced out to a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the second thanks to RBI doubles by both Spencer Levine and Richie Garcia in the second inning.
Rutgers responded with a solo home run by Jawaun Harris to make it 2-1.
Levine would add another RBI in the game on a line drive that went off of Rutgers pitcher John O’Reilly that would go for an infield hit, scoring Eli Lovell.
For Levine, that was his 20th RBI, which is a team high.
The next batter, Nick Rivera, drove in a run with an RBI hit to give FGCU a three-run, 4-1 lead.
Tom Marcinczyk hit Rutgers second solo homer of the game to cut the Eagles lead to two.
“The first solo home run was my fault,” Tollett said. “That’s not Garrett Anderson. That was a bad, bad call by Dave Tollett, not Garrett Anderson. And the next one, we throw strikes. We got behind and the kid hit it out opposite way. I’ll take those chances any day of the week.”
The Eagles scored a fifth run in the fifth after Lovell reached base, and on a wild pitch would come around to score from first as the catcher, Chris Folinusz’s, throw went into center field and got past the the centerfielder to allow Lovell to score.
Rutgers last real scoring chance came in the sixth with runners on second and third with two outs, but Anderson got a ground out to second to get out of the jam.
Anderson would finish eight innings before handing the ball off to Sterling Koerner who picked up the save.
“From the beginning, I just trusted everything,” Anderson said. “Defense played really, really well for me. Offense put up some runs early so it just made it a little easy to go out and attack hitters knowing I had a little bit of a cushion.”
With Koerner’s save, the program was tied in a record with his 13th career save in one inning of work.
The Eagles will be right back at it tomorrow with Josh Dye (3-1) on the hill for the Eagles as the lefty looks for his fourth win of the season on Saturday at 2:00 p.m. He will be opposed by sophomore Serafino Brito (0-4) who is still looking for his first win of the season in four starts.

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