Records all across minor league baseball got reset on Friday for the beginning of the second half of the season. For the Wilmington Blue Rocks, it was a chance to jump out to a better start than before, when they lost their first five games and eventually found themselves a season-low 12 games under .500 in the middle of May.

But it wasn’t the start Wilmington had hoped for, as the Blue Rocks fell to the Asheville Tourists 3-2 in the second half opener.

Toeing the rubber for the Rocks was 27-year-old Shinnosuke Ogasawara, who was down from Triple-A for a rehab start. It was the first time the Japanese pitching phenom stepped foot into Daniel S. Frawley Stadium, and he was impressed, to say the least.

“There’s a lot of fans here. I enjoyed it,” Ogasawara said. 

However, the nearly 5,900 fans in the stands didn’t get the best first impression from Ogasawara. A leadoff four-pitch walk to Joseph Sullivan put one on for the Astros’ No. 3 prospect Walker Janek, who crushed the 2-2 pitch all the way to the back of the Blue Rocks bullpen out in left field for a two-run home run. 

That was the last base runner that the Tourists could muster against Ogasawara through the remainder of his outing, which lasted three innings. He retired the next nine batters, with five of those outs all coming via the strikeout. 

“I tried to simplify everything,” Ogasawara said. “I tried to just be myself, and then after the second inning, I tried to attack the zone and play just like I’ve been pitching in Japan.”

While Ogasawara was keeping the Tourists off the bath paths, the Blue Rocks were causing havoc on them. T.J. White led off the second inning with a broken bat single, and then came around to score after a two-out, RBI double from Jackson Ross.

One inning later, Ogasawara’s battery mate Caleb Lomavita took him off the hook for a loss with an RBI single that scored Sam Petersen, who was off and running on the pitch. 

“[Petersen] saw the pitcher shake twice, indicating that he wasn’t ready… so he just wanted to take third if I were to get the walk and have it be a first and third situation,” Lomavita said. “I knew I could handle the pitch up… I got the pitch I was looking for and didn’t want to do too much with it.”

However, Asheville delivered the game-sealing blow in the sixth. After retiring Lucas Spence for the first out of the inning, the Tourists strung together three straight hits to load the bases, and eventually scored that game-winning run after an RBI single from Drew Brutcher. 

After a sweep over Hub City just a week prior, Friday’s loss marked the third straight for a team that was showing signs of a turnaround. Since May 14, the Blue Rocks have been one of the better teams in the South Atlantic League with a 20-12 record.

“We’ve played the majority of the teams. We know what they have, they know what we have,” Lomavita said. “That’s the biggest key going into the second half… A lot of these guys are in their second season, maybe even first, like myself. So this second half is going to be huge of scratching and clawing for staying in every at-bat and staying where your feet are.”

For comments/questions about this story, DM us on Instagram @thewhitatrowan or email [email protected]