Fortunately, there are baseball clichés that apply to nights like this.
Barnstormers first baseman Matt LeCroy beats York's Matt Padgett to the bag.
Barnstormers' Nick Renault delivers a pitch.
It's a long season ... You can't get too high or too low … There's a lot of failure in this game… .The Barnstormers needed all of them — mumbled quietly, with heads down — to get through this long, dismal night.
Lancaster struggled in all aspects in getting smashed by the York Revolution 16-4 before a lively crowd of 6,288 Saturday at Sovereign Bank Stadium.
The Barnstormers still lead the War of the Roses series with York 6-3 this year, and 16-11 including last season. They still lead the Revolution by a game in the race to avoid having the Atlantic League's worst record.
And this is all really time-biding until the second half of the AL schedule, which begins Tuesday.
None of which made this mess easier to deal with.
"This is one of those nights when you're glad to you play 140 games instead of three or four," Barnstormers manager Von Hayes said with a mirthless laugh.
"We've got to do a lot of things a whole lot better than we did them tonight."
The Barnstormers were no-hit for five innings by Frank Castillo, 39, who pitched in the major leagues from 1992 through 2005, but who also came into Saturday with an 8.62 earned-run average.
Lancaster finally broke up the gem and generated some offense in the sixth, but only via infield dribblers, a soft blooper and, later, walks and a passed ball. The Barnstormers' only hard-hit ball of the night was Lloyd Turner's double off the wall in the sixth.
York matched that in its first at-bat of the night, when Kennard Jones banged one off the top-right corner of Sovereign Bank's Green Monster-esque left-field wall.
It was one of three doubles in York's three-run first inning.
In the second Jose Enrique Cruz got one over the monster, after a Jones single, to make it 5-0.
Chris Ashby homered after Cruz' single in the fifth, but that frame got ugly when the Barnstormers got an force out at home off Shea Hillenbrand's bouncer to first. Lancaster catcher Kevin Kotch then fired to first for the double play — and into right field.
Then: another hit, a couple more walks, and York had a six-hit, five-run inning with all the runs, remarkably, earned.
It was 10-0. The Revs limped sloppily home from there, and got an exclamation point in Matt Esquivel's thunderous, way-outta-here two-run homer in the eighth.
The last time the Barnstormers were here, in May, the Revs looked like a brutally overmatched offensive club. They've upgraded considerably since then. They're still the AL's lowest-scoring club, but trail the Barnstormers by only run after Saturday.
"They swung the bats well the last couple nights," Hayes said, counting his team's 9-8 comeback win here Friday.
"We were fortunate to win yesterday, and now we've got to try to win the series and get going for the second half."
You may recognize Hillenbrand's name. He was a major-league all-star in 2002 and 2005, but saw live pitching for the first time last week since being released by the Los Angeles Dodgers late last season, and is obviously rusty. He's batting eighth. He was the last Revolution player to get a hit. He added a two-run double in the eighth, but then lost track of the outs — by two — and got himself out on the bases.
Jones, Cruz, Ashby and Jason Aspito, Nos. 1-4 in the York order, combined for 10 hits, three home runs, 11 runs scored and seven RBI.
The series concludes at 5:07 p.m. today in York, Shane Youman pitching for Lancaster against York's Wayne Franklin.
Mike Gross is a Sunday News sports writer. E-mail him at mgross@lnpnews.com.
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