GOWANDA — Against a team like Gowanda, the margin for error is small, Portville coach Joe Pleakis acknowledged.
So even while Portville held a 7-3 advantage in total hits Thursday night in a Section 6 Class C baseball semifinal, it wasn’t enough to make up for a handful of mistakes. On its home turf, Gowanda won 8-1, ending Portville’s season a game short of the sectional finals.
“It’s tough. Baseball is a funny sport like that,” Pleakis said. “We knew they were a good team. We knew we were a good team. I thought we started off well but we didn’t quite bring our best.”
Junior Aidan DeFazio, one of three returning starters entering the season, took the mound as Portville’s starting pitcher and gave the Panthers a chance. He allowed just three hits over six innings. He struck out six batters with four walks. But Gowanda still scored eight runs, seven of them unearned, with innings extended by five Portville errors.
“He threw a heck of a game,” Pleakis said. “Especially a tight game like that, the first couple innings were kind of bang-bang back and forth. Being the away team you get to bat first and when you don’t jump out and put a run up, that’s a game that can (easily) get away from you — at their home field, they’ve got the crowd there going nuts — and I thought he controlled the game very well … He was dealing tonight. He was feeling it.”
Ty Kosinski doubled and scored Portville’s only run, which cut the early Gowanda lead to 3-1 in the top of the fourth.
Izayah Edmund singled and drove in the run. DeFazio, Dylan Chudy, Cole Keesler, Braedon Carter and Peyton Carter each singled as well.
Carter Capozzi pitched an efficient five-inning start for No. 2 Gowanda (19-3). He struck out eight batters without a walk and allowed just the one run while scattering five hits. Blake Herman threw a hitless sixth and Noah Lauer allowed two hits but neither scored in the seventh.
At the plate, Herman tripled with an RBI and scored three times. Logan Ruff singled and drove in two runs.
Pleakis noted it’s hard to “nitpick” what went wrong for his team.
“In the end we didn’t quite bring our best and when you get to playoff baseball, if you don’t bring your best you might go home,” he said. “And playing Gowanda, there’s not a lot of room for error there.”
Gowanda will face No. 1 seed Frewsburg (17-4) in the championship Saturday at 11 a.m. at Jamestown’s Diethrick Park. It will mark Gowanda’s fifth consecutive trip to the sectional final, including title wins in 2023 and 2021.
Portville ends the season at 10-8, falling in the sectional semifinals as a No. 6 seed in Pleakis’ first season as head coach. The Panthers are set to lose eight seniors to graduation.
Portville started the season 3-5, including 1-3 before a spring break trip, but Pleakis credits his team for staying together amid the early struggles.
“We started off probably by anybody’s standards, certainly ours, I would say rough,” he said. “We went to Myrtle Beach under .500 and didn’t play well there and it was like what are we going to do?
“Credit to our senior leaders — Aidan’s even a part of that group and he’s a junior — for them to buckle down and not give in. It’s easy to fold when you come back from spring break, it’s nice weather and there’s a hundred other things to do. But credit to the guys, they stuck with it and we came back and we went on a run which was, starting over after Myrtle Beach, what we were hoping to do.”
AT GOWANDA
R H E
Portville 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 — 1 7 5
Gowanda 0 0 3 0 2 3 X — 8 3 1
Aidan DeFazio (6 SO, 4 BB) and Dylan Chudy
Carter Capozzi (8 SO, 0 BB), Blake Herman (6) (0 SO, 0 BB), Noah Lauer (7) (0 SO, 0 BB) and Jayden Fish
