Parkland baseball seemed to be cruising along, when all of a sudden, two late inning losses threw an obstacle onto the roadway. Last week, Liberty (6-0 Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, 8-1 overall) came up with a four-run seventh inning to beat the Trojans 5-2, and this week, division rival Emmaus got three in the top of the sixth and held on for a 3-2 win.

Emmaus’ Matt Lanzone and Parkland’s Mike Jenkins were locked in a pitcher’s duel for five innings in Monday’s game before Emmaus broke through in the sixth. A leadoff single followed by a well executed hit-and-run gave Emmaus their first real scoring opportunity of the day against Jenkins, who allowed the first run of the game on an RBI single by Evan Marushak. That’s when the problems really started. A throwing error brought in one run and another throwing error allowed Emmaus to put three runs on the board in the inning.

“Limiting the damage in that inning is what you try to do and we just didn’t get it done,” said Parkland head coach Kurt Weber. “We were out of that inning, really with just one run, and we just didn’t make a throw and then we try to scoop a ball that should have been blocked and those are just plays that really were just the difference in the game.”

Even though they were down 3-0 late in the game, Parkland didn’t let up. A one-out double by Cullen Wadsworth to deep left field put Parkland (3-2, 4-3) in a position to cut into the lead, and one out later, Adam Mellinger singled to left, making it 3-1. Lanzone worked out of the inning from there, but Parkland came right back at him in the seventh.

Again with one out, Ethan Imler got drilled by a pitch to give the Trojans a base runner. Lanzone exited and Kellen Tulio came on to pitch for the Hornets and got the first batter he faced, but Imler moved to second on the ground out by Christian Kinsley. Austin Mueller then followed with an RBI single, and suddenly it was a one-run game.

Tulio settled in and got Jenkins to hit a ground ball to short that Emmaus was able to turn into a force out at second to end the game. Emmaus (5-1, 7-2) and Parkland won’t have to wait long for a rematch, with the two teams meeting again on Monday at Emmaus.

The two conference losses back-to-back are a setback for a Parkland team that was coming off a big 8-0 win over a previously unbeaten Northampton team that looked to be a big momentum boost for the Trojans. Both losses came as a result of late inning runs, but Weber doesn’t believe that will hurt his team’s confidence.

“I think we have good enough senior leadership that we’ll learn from this and get better at it, and there are ways to practice that pressure and when we get a chance to practice, we’ll get after it,” said Weber. “We’re just on our heels a little bit right now. The whole season is like this. You have peaks and valleys and you just have to ride them out.

“We talked to the kids after the Northampton win at Coca-Cola Park and we told them, ‘don’t get too excited yet. We’ve got a long way to go.’””

The EPC has a lot of parity, and the tough Skyline Division is a free-for-all at this point, with everybody having at least one conference loss, but nobody having more than three. With plenty of baseball to play, you can truly say that nobody is out of it in the division, and the rest of the league shows a lot of parity, as well.

“Coming into the season, we thought the league was going to be really strong with capable pitching all the way through,” said Weber. “It’s playing out that way, and looking back, we played a Stroudsburg team that really hit the ball well and a Northampton team that we got the better of is doing really well. It’s just a deep league, and we’re not out of anything by any stretch of the imagination and it’s really just a matter of playing better and that’s what we’ve got to work on.”