U-G-L-Y

Tempers flared and pitchers struggled tonight at Fraser Field as the Brockton Rox captured the 2nd-half opener, 11-6, giving John Kelly a loss and Oil Can Boyd the victory. A big crowd at Fraser Field tonight witnessed this as well as seeing Spirit manager John Kennedy and pitching coach Klae Calvert completely lose their cool in yet another argument with the bush-league Can Am umpires, especially Beavers and Joe "Slim Slo" Pescucci. But the bottomline is regardless of the circumstances the Spirit lost and will have to win the next two to continue their recent dominance of Brockton.

It started off quite poorly for the Spirit. The first batter of the game, Matt Cucarullo, homered on the very first pitch, unleashing a 4-run inning off of John Kelly to start it and putting the Spirit in a deep hole early. Throughout the inning the crowd grimaced as John Kelly was squeezed, but that wasn't the story, the story was a spotty fastball that the Rox were hammering. He settled down however and held it at 4-0 for a while.

In the 3rd the Spirit finally knocked around Oil Can. Yuri Sanchez and Marcos Agramonte hit back to back doubles, then Rob Fischer hit a 2 Run homer to make it 4-3. Things weren't that way for long however as the Rox extended the lead to 6-3 with a pair off of Kelly in the 6th. In the 7th the Rox made it 7-3 and chased Kelly.

The Spirit dinged around Oil Can Boyd, smashing two more runs off of him to make it 7-5, and closing again, to 7-6, but that's as close as they'd ever be, as the bullpen, namely Jarret Sues, continued to struggle and the final score was 11-6.

The highlight wound up being an ugly incident in the 8th. Nobody really knows what set off John Kennedy, but after some arguments over balls and strikes, including Jose Garcia and Brian Macchi called out on controversial calls, some shouting from the dugout sparked an incident on the field. Apparently, somehow Tom Donahue was ejected, and reportedly that's what set off JK , who stormed out of the dugout and got into a violent and intense shouting match that turned a bit physical with some shoves and swings. Klae Calvert too got into the mix, screaming at Joe Pescucci, while Kennedy fought with Beavers. The highlight was Kennedy tossing third base at the ump on the way out the door.

The Spirit will hope to regroup tomorrow night at 5:05 at Fraser Field in game 2 of the 3 game set leading up to the Allstar break.