Zac Gallen (North Carolina) looked into the ground and racked through his memory. He was trying to remember if he had ever tied a baseball game. He hadn’t. 

“I don’t think it’s ever happened to me,” Gallen said. “It’s weird.”

Gallen was masterful in six innings of work, but Chatham (3-5-1) tied Falmouth (4-4-1), 3-3, after the game was capped at 12 innings at Arnie Allen Diamond at Guv Fuller Field on Friday night. It was the second straight extra-inning game for the Anglers, but this time neither team plated a run after Harwich edged Chatham in 10 on Thursday. 

Zac Gallen (North Carolina) threw a great start in a 3-3 tie against Falmouth on Saturday night. 

Box Score:

Game Tracker

After Gallen kept the Commodores at bay by striking out three hitters in a convincing six frames — the deepest a Chatham starter has gone this season — but Falmouth deflected the pitching performance and edged ahead before the Anglers drew even for the rest of the night. 

“I saw a lot of good things,” Chatham manager John Schiffner said. “I was really glad to see them score early after last night.”

Chatham lost a heart breaker to the Mariners at Red Wilson Field a day before facing the Commodores, and scratched across two runs early in the game. 

The Anglers scratched across their first run in the top of the second, and used the legs of center fielder Landon Cray (Seattle) to do so. Cray extended the inning by legging out an infield single to load the bases. Then Garrett Hampson (Long Beach State) bounced a grounder to the middle of the infield and Cray beat a throw to second while Landon Lassiter (North Carolina) crossed the plate. 

“That was the idea, that we wanted to go out and get a run right away,” Hampson said. “When we did it took a load off and let us settle in.”

With a 2-0 lead, Gallen was cruising through his first Cape Cod League start. After yielding a single to the first hitter of the game, Gallen used a double play to speed up the first and didn’t give up another hit until there was one out in the bottom of the sixth. He only struck out three hitters in that span, but Falmouth also didn’t hit a single ball out of the infield. 

Chatham went down in order in the third and fourth and only managed a two-out run in the fifth, but Gallen had hit his stride. 

“Fastball and slider was working,” Gallen said. “I was throwing those well and that allowed me to get outs.”

Garrett Williams (Oklahoma State) relieved Gallen at the start of the seventh inning, and the Commodores loaded the bases before he handed the ball to Jeff Gelinas (Maine), who allowed a two-run double that gave Falmouth a 3-2 lead. Only one of the three runs in the inning were earned, and all charged to Williams who Schiffner said “ran into some bad luck.”

Mitchell Gunsolus (Gonzaga) then scored on a wild pitch in the top of the ninth that knotted the game before a combination of Kyle Davis (Southern California), Paul Covelle (Franklin Pierce) and Bryan Goossens (Siena) pitched the game to an unceremonious end. 

As the Chatham players packed up around the dugout most said they couldn’t remember the last time they played in a game that ended in a tie. Gallen wasn’t alone, they all thought hard but laughed before saying that it was something they’d never experienced before. 

Then there was Gunsolus, who played on the Cape last summer but said that he tied twice during the spring with the Bulldogs. He was the only player that brushed the tie aside as a normalcy with a hint of uneasiness. 

Gunsolus said: “Yeah I’ve seen it. It’s still weird.”

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