The visiting Portsmouth middle school baseball team shut out Winman 2-0 on Thursday afternoon to eliminate the Warriors from the postseason.

Zach Scotti was impressive on the mound for Winman despite the loss, going for 6 1/3 innings and racking up nine strikeouts while allowing just two runs on just three hits.

Despite Winman’s solid pitching and defense, the bats went cold as the Warriors collected only four hits and got just five runners on base.

“We always (play clean), pitching, defense. Our hitting has been up and down and today it was down. They were throwing it in there and we just couldn’t really do much with it. Portsmouth made a lot of plays, made a lot of plays in the field. They’re kind of like us I think. Pitching, defense, they didn’t crush the ball,” said Winman coach Ryan Rix after the loss. “Scotti been doing it all year long; all of our pitchers have been doing it all year long. We haven’t been a very good hitting team, we don’t have a lot of power. We have guys that can get on base and are scrappy but it’s been our pitching and defense. We just couldn’t get anything going with our bats.”

Although the Warriors were trending upward toward the end of the regular season, they were unable to produce offensively in the final two games and ran out of steam down the stretch.

“We had a couple of guys on base but just couldn’t get a big hit, we just couldn’t get the big play. We beat Vets two games ago and that was a really good win for us but then we got shut out by Ferri and we got shut out here. I don’t know if they had some hangover from it, who knows,” said Rix.

The Warriors close out the year with a 7-6 overall record. Despite the early playoff exit, Rix was proud of his team’s performance and the effort it demonstrated on a daily basis.

 “We started at 1-3 and finished at 7-5. We got better every day, we couldn’t get onto our field until April, we couldn’t practice, we started slow,” said Rix. These kids did everything I asked them to and more. I can’t say enough about all these kids.”

Scotti got two hits for the Warriors while Collin Tainsh and Bill Leduc added singles. Matt Colvin pitched 2/3 of an inning in relief for Winman.