By Maxwell Paul McLaughlin
The Whitecaps beat the Mariners 5-3 and swept their way to the Cape League semi-final.
The Whitecaps went up three in the first and never looked back as they took down the Harwich Mariners for the second straight season in the playoffs.
At the start of game two, the Whitecaps came out hot, this time in the top of the first inning. After Dylan Goldstein (Florida Atlantic) drew a walk and Kurtis Byrne singled, Cam Fisher whacked a three-run home run to give the Whitecaps a 3-0 lead.
Tommy Seidel (Alabama) got one run back in the bottom of the second with a solo home run over the left field wall.
The Whitecaps scored another two runs in the bottom of the second off a Carson Demartini (Virginia Tech) RBI single and then an RBI double from Nick Larusso (Maryland).
Larusso and Demartini have both continued to dominate opposing pitching in the last couple of weeks of the season.
In the bottom of the seventh, the Harwich Mariners scored a 5-2 game and got the tying run to the plate in defending Cape League MVP Brock Wilken (Wake Forest). Wilken then had an infield single to make it 5-3.
The Mariners then went down in order in the bottom of the eighth, and the score stayed at 5-3 going into the ninth inning with the playoffs on the line.
The Whitecaps, with a great chance for some insurance, left runners on second and third in the top of the ninth, with the Mariners coming up and three outs remaining in their season.
Harwich went down in order to end the ball game and send the Whitecaps on to the next round in the 2022 CCBL playoffs.
The Whitecaps will go head to head with the Y-D Red Sox in the Cape League semi-final starting on Sunday.