Former Wingnuts lead Laredo to win

The most damaging aspect of Monday’s game for the Wingnuts was the uniform stitching.

Former Wingnuts Abel Nieves, Jimmy Mojica and Omar Bencomo now wear jerseys embroidered with “Laredo” and those three had Wichita hoping, at least for one night, that they could return.

Nieves and Mojica each reached base three times, combining for two runs and a pair of RBIs, and Bencomo allowed one run in eight innings in his second start this season at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium, a 6-1 Laredo win.

Bencomo was traded last week from the Wingnuts, who acquired designated hitter Matt Padgett for their No. 5 starter. Padgett had two hits and Wichita’s only RBI on Monday, but Bencomo controlled the rest of the game.

“It’s a little weird because I love most of the guys that they’ve got in Wichita,” said Bencomo, who pitched six scoreless innings for the Wingnuts at home on May 27. “But this is baseball — it’s a business, so I was just coming here doing my job.”

Wichita believed it could afford to trade Bencomo because of the depth of its pitching staff and because of its inconsistent offense, which followed a 15-run showing on Sunday at Lincoln by managing seven singles against Bencomo before John Brebbia worked a perfect ninth inning.

The Wingnuts had three leadoff hits against Bencomo but only Dustin Geiger, who advanced on a wild pitch in the eighth inning, reached second base.

Bencomo allowed a baserunner in five of the first six innings but rarely pitched while in trouble. The Wingnuts organized a two-out rally in the sixth with two hits and a walk, which netted their only run, but they were mostly kept off-balance by Bencomo’s pitch mixture, which he said included “a lot of change-ups.”

Bencomo escaped the sixth by picking David Espinosa off second base.

“I love him,” Wingnuts manager Kevin Hooper said. “I didn’t want to give him up, but it’s a lot easier to replace a guy every fifth day than to add a guy like Padgett in your lineup. And we’ve struggled offensively, so I felt like we needed it.”

Laredo got all the runs it needed on the first five pitches of the game. Mojica, who played for the Wingnuts briefly in 2011, singled before scoring on a triple by Nieves, who won the American Association batting title with a .357 average last year before returning for last year’s stretch run.

Nieves, who hit .558 in the final 13 games of the regular season in 2014 before the Wingnuts won the league championship, scored Laredo’s second run on Anthony Capra’s wild pitch.

Capra rebounded to strike out the next three batters and ended up lasting seven innings, striking out nine and allowing an unearned run in the fifth.

“That change-up is so good,” Hooper said. “We talk about it all the time – guys know it’s coming and still have a tough time with it. Once they ambushed him, he made a quick adjustment to get off that fastball right away and throwing the change-up. He got a lot of swings and misses.”

Laredo scored three in the ninth on five hits against Byron Minnich. Nieves followed Mojica’s RBI single with his third hit in the only case of the former Wingnuts working against one another.

The top of the ninth lasted so long – Minnich threw 38 pitches – that Bencomo didn’t get the chance for a complete game.

“I knew all the hitters,” Bencomo said. “So I came with some plan. I kept my plan the whole game.”

This story was originally published June 8, 2015 at 10:43 PM with the headline "Former Wingnuts lead Laredo to win."