MARBLEHEAD — The Peabody baseball team got a top-tier pitching performance from sophomore Mike Geissler and matched it with 14 hits to cruise past Northeastern Conference rival Marblehead 10-0 in six innings on the road Friday night.
“We hit the ball today, played great defense and got great pitching from Mike,” Peabody coach Mark Bettencourt said. “We got some timely hits when we needed them. I mean, that’s what we’re capable of doing. We’ve been telling them that all season. That’s a good Marblehead team we just beat. There’s something to be said for that.”
Geissler threw all six innings and allowed just five hits with four strikeouts and one hit batter.
Peabody got contributions up and down the lineup. Jacob Palharas (3-for-3) led the way with three RBI and one run scored. Giovani Guglielmo had an RBI and two runs scored while Brendan Smith had an RBI and a run scored. Captain Ryan Knight and Nick Villano each scored a pair of runs and Juan Tolentino added two RBI.
“The ingredients for a good team are here,” Bettencourt said. “The pieces of the puzzle are here; we just have to put them in place. Every inning I feel like we are capable of scoring. There’s not one inning where I think we’re in trouble. We have hitters throughout the lineup that can produce.”
Marblehead fell into an early hole and couldn’t dig out of it like its last meeting with Peabody — an 11-5 win for the Magicians. Ben Weed started the game on the mound but fell into some early trouble. Matthew Titus’ single to left was the only Marblehead hit to get out of the infield. Gadot Gaskins, Schuyler Schmitt, Andrew Titus and Sami Loughlin all had infield singles.
“Peabody came out swinging,” Marblehead coach Mike Giardi said. “And they’re a good team. The game we beat them I would rather say they beat themselves. They were up 4-2 and gave us a lot of runs in the seventh inning. Today they came out swinging and put up a big number right away.
“Weed has been struggling early,” Giardi said. “He gets into a groove as he goes along. He gave up three early, two later on and we finally just pulled him out. We didn’t want to go too much with him because we needed to put up numbers offensively.”
Peabody pushed across some early runs right away in the first, thanks to RBI singles from Guglielmo and Palharas and a sacrifice fly from Joe Raymond to go ahead 3-0.
Later in the third, a double from Knight and a pair of walks by Guglielmo and Smith loaded the bases for the Tanners, who scored on an error and an RBI single from Palharas to go up 5-0.
Peabody broke it open with four runs in the fifth. Palharas laced his third RBI single to start things off before a sacrifice fly from Mike Krause and a two-run double off the bat of Tolentino stretched the lead to 9-0.
That was more than enough run support for Geissler and Smith’s sixth inning RBI, which helped the Tanners finish things up in six innings.
Peabody (8-7) hopes to stay hot Sunday (12) at Masconomet.
Marblehead (11-4) is right back at home against Winthrop Saturday (10).
