JetHawks throw away lead, game

Gary Thomas scored on a wild pitch in the bottom of the ninth inning as Modesto rallied to beat Lancaster.

Now it appears they should never feel comfortable away from the Antelope Valley, either.

The JetHawks opened their current nine-game road trip by watching a three-run ninth-inning lead and a four-run advantage in the fifth inning slip away on consecutive nights at The Epicenter in Rancho Cucamonga.

Friday, they completed the hat trick, squandering a four-run lead after the seventh-inning stretch at Modesto's John Thurman Field.

Gary Thomas capped the A's comeback by scoring from third base on a wild pitch by Justin Kaye with one out in the bottom of the ninth inning to give Modesto a 7-6 victory over Lancaster.

"This is a tough way to lose," JetHawks manager Darrin Garner. "To lose like this is frustrating. We led the whole ballgame and then to lose like that. I didn't even see it. I had my back turned on the wild pitch."

The JetHawks fell to a minor league-worst and franchise-low 31 games under .500 (34-65 overall) and 11-18 in the second half. It was Lancaster's fourth loss in four games on the road trip.

The JetHawks made too many mistakes to end the losing skid Friday, committing three errors, all of which were charged to shortstop Joel Ramirez. They also walked nine Modesto batters and hit another.

"We did a little bit of everything tonight," Garner said. "We scored some runs, we made some mistakes, we made some bad pitches."

The most costly of those bad pitches obviously came in the ninth inning from Kaye (2-4).

Thomas led off the frame with a double into the left-center gap. He advanced to third on a groundout by Rafael Pujols before scoring the winning run during Caonabo Cosme's at-bat.

"The sad thing is we haven't played that bad in these losses," Garner said. "We just need to find a way to put it all together and make it stick."

Much like he did in Tuesday's ninth-inning come-from-ahead loss to the Quakes, right-hander Jeff Farnsworth found it difficult to hold on to a formidable late lead.

"You have to go with the guy who has been hot," Garner said. "Jeff had been doing a good job for us, but he has struggled his last two outings for us and couldn't close the door."

The JetHawks used a three-run second inning, in which Modesto had more errors (three) than Lancaster had hits (one), and a threerun homer from Jermaine Clark in the seventh to build a 6-2 advantage before Farnsworth came in to take over for reliever Tim McClaskey.

McClaskey had just completed 4 scoreless innings to allow the JetHawks to build the seemingly comfortable lead.

But Modesto cut that advantage in half in the bottom of the seventh with the help of three walks from Farnsworth and two of Ramirez's errors. Things got worse for Farnsworth in the eighth when three consecutive one-out singles loaded the bases and brought an end to his evening.

Kaye then walked the first batter he faced, Oscar Salazar, to force home a run before Jason Hart's RBI groundout tied the game 6-6 and set up Thomas' ninth-inning heroics.

The ninth-inning victory marked the second in a row for the A's, who stole a 7-6 win from Bakersfield on Thursday with Jacques Landry's ninth-inning RBI double.