In its first home game of the season, NIU baseball earned a win over the UIC Flames, 8-6. This is the Huskies (5-16) third consecutive win.

NIU’s lineup scored six of its eight runs in the second inning.

“That one inning literally cost us the game,” said UIC coach Mike Dee. “I didn’t think we pitched very well. I thought we got a really bad start out of Salemi, and then obviously, we made the two defensive mistakes that we don’t normally make behind him, but the biggest problem was we weren’t getting ahead in the count.”

With Jeff Zimmerman on second base and Alex Klonowski on first base, Troy White layed down a sacrifice bunt down the third base line, but beat it out to load the bases. NIU’s Micah McCulloch then hit what should have been a double play ball to UIC shortstop Ryan Shober, who made an error allowing Zimmerman to score from third, giving it a 1-0 lead.

During Joe Battaglia’s at bat, UIC pitcher Matt Salemi threw a wild pitch, which allowed Klonowski to score from third, insreasing the Huskies’ lead to 2-0. After Jamison Wells reached on a fielders choice, the bases were loaded for Jordan Huffman, who quickly cleared them with a double down the left line making the score 5-0.

With Huffman on second base, Alex Jones hit a ball to right field that was dropped by UIC’s Jon Ryan, which allowed Huffman to score from second base, giving the Huskies a 6-0 lead.

“It was huge,” said NIU coach Ed Mathey. “It was a big momentum boost. It was good to see that we took advantage of a couple opportunities and we kept our foot on the throttle, and Huffman with the big blow down the line really helped us out.”

With the score 6-1 in the fifth inning, the Huskies added two more runs on a sacrifice fly from Zimmerman that scored Wells and an RBI single from Klonowski making the score 8-1.

In the top of the ninth inning with the score still 8-5, NIU’s Kyle Glancy came on to close out the game.

With the bases loaded and two outs, Glancy got Shober to ground into a fielder’s choice to give the Huskies the win, while earning his fourth save of the year.