Italian Baseball Series Game 5:
(1-4) T&A San Marino – Fortitudo UGF Bologna 2-16
BOL 200 200 435 16 18 0 SMA 000 110 000 2 4 3
FORTITUDO BOLOGNA is the 2009 Italian Baseball champion. They defeated last year’s winner T&A SAN MARINO 16-2 on Wednesday to win the best-of-seven series 4-1. It is the first Italian Baseball League title for BOLOGNA since 2005.
FORTITUDO took a fast 4-0 lead after two runs apiece in the first and the fourth inning. T&A countered with single runs in the bottom of the fourth and fifth to cut the deficit in a half. BOLOGNA blew the game wide open by scoring twelve runs in the last three frames.
Eddy Garabito, Juan Carlos Infante and Richard Austin (4-5, 3 runs, 5 RBI) homered. Joseph Mazzuca went three-for-six with two runs scored and four RBI. The top six of the batting order scored 15 of the 16 runs and combined for 13 RBI. Martin Vasquez hit a solo homerun for SAN MARINO.
Yulman Ribeiro (W 1-1) allowed four hits, two runs and three bb in seven innings. He struck out three. Matteo D’Angelo and Fabio Milano closed it out by retiring the last six batters in order. Tiago Da Silva (L 1-1) couldn’t repeat his performance from game two and issued eight hits and four runs in four-plus innings.
Claudio Liverziani received the MVP award for his Italian Series performance, batting .571 (OBP .680/SLG .857) with one homerun, seven runs scored and six RBI.
Attendance for the fifth match in San Marino was announced as 1,000, which was in line with the other four games (average of 1,100) of the Italian Baseball Series. Last year an average of 2,620 people were in attendance per game during the championship series. Attendance also was down during the semi-final round, where a total of 9,758 people came to the 18 games in comparison to 19,500 in 2008. Regular season numbers in the IBL (Overall Numbers: 2008: 58,422; 2009: 41,613) also were down by about 28 percent.
Recap Game 1: Bologna – San Marino 2-1
Recap Game 2: Bologna – San Marino 1-3
Recap Game 3: San Marino – Bologna 3-4
Recap Game 4: San Marino – Bologna 7-17
Photo: © Ferrini/FIBS