66ers’ big inning spoils home opener for Nuts

At 23, you have to figure Michael Benjamin Jr. has seen more baseball than pretty much anyone else his age.

His father, Mike Benjamin, enjoyed a 13-year major league career – the first seven with the San Francisco Giants – before getting into college and professional coaching.

So the Modesto Nuts’ second baseman knows there’s no reason to panic, not when the other team is in the middle of a seven-run inning, and certainly not when a team is 3-5 this early in the season – as are the Nuts after Thursday’s 8-4 home opener loss to Inland Empire.

“You want to come out and win every game, and we’ve had just a couple things not going our way,” said Benjamin, who had three of Modesto’s eight hits. “We’re not playing as well as we can as a team right now, and we know we can play better because of the way we played last year.”

Baseball and a perfectly comfortable April evening brought 3,588 fans to John Thurman Field for the 69th Opening Night in franchise history and the 11th wearing the Nuts moniker as an affiliate of the Colorado Rockies.

And for most of the game, it appeared the Nuts would keep the home fans happy, riding the solid start of Johendi Jiminian to a 3-1 lead through five innings.

Even then, the two-run lead could have been much larger. Inland Empire starter Harrison Cooney hit four batters and allowed single runs in each of the first three innings, but got through five innings by striking out eight and leaving the bases loaded in the second and third innings.

The lack of the big, game-breaking hit came back to bite Modesto in the sixth, when the 66ers sent 10 batters to the plate to score seven runs.

The big hit came after Jiminian left the game with one out after hitting a batter and allowing two singles to load the bases.

Reliever Matt Pierpont hit a batter on an 0-2 pitch to force in a run, and 66ers second baseman Kody Eaves followed with a long line drive to left field that was misplayed by Ramiel Tapia for a three-run triple.

Angel Rosa would cap the inning with a two-run homer down the line in left, and the 66ers had turned a 3-1 deficit into an 8-3 lead.

Modesto’s already been on the plus side of a big inning this season, scoring eight in one frame at Lake Elsinore last Friday. But this shouldn’t happen in the home opener - the team’s first performance in front of the home fans.

“It’s baseball,” Benjamin said. “You have to try to minimize the big rallies, but tonight we couldn’t do that. We were on the other side of it the other night.”

Benjamin’s father, who coached for several years at Arizona State, is back in the professional ranks as the manager for the Arizona Diamondbacks’ short-season Arizona League team.

Meanwhile, Junior is several rungs ahead on the professional ladder, and hopes to keep it that way for a while. In the meantime, he’s very excited about this year’s Modesto Nuts, no matter what happened on opening night.

“It’s going to be exciting once we all turn it on, because we’re going to be really good - a lot better than we are right now,” Benjamin said.

This story was originally published April 16, 2015 at 10:47 PM with the headline "66ers’ big inning spoils home opener for Nuts."