The Londonderry Police Department team had very little trouble extending its winning streak in the annual Londonderry Old Home Day softball series against the town’s fire department squad when those rival teams met in their 2016 contest on the Matthew Thornton School field last Friday night, Aug. 19.
The police crew hammered out an astounding 49 hits and enjoyed a pair of 12-run innings in pummeling the fire department squad by a 43-6 score. That huge success pushed the cops to their fifth consecutive win in the annual series and their 10th victory in the last 11 meetings.
The police contingent plated at least three runs in each of the six innings in which it batted, tallying a dozen runs in both the second and sixth frames. The firemen scored once in the first inning, three times in the third, and once each in the sixth and seventh innings in notching their six runs. The losing side finished up with a total of 13 hits.
The victorious police team consisted of Chuck Nickerson, Mark Morrison, Chris Olson, Dan Perry, Justin Hallock, Nick Pinardi, Junior Garcia, Keith Lee, Jim Freda, Tom Olsen, and Randy Duguay.
The fire department crew was made up of Peter DeVoe, Jeremy Mague, Steve Cotton, Zach O’Brien, Riley Northrup, Chris Schofield, Brian Schofield, Mike Roberson, and Bruce Hallowell.
Tom Olsen proved to be an absolute RBI machine for the winning side, pounding a pair of three-run home runs and then a two-run blast and a run-scoring single before having to leave to play in another softball contest elsewhere.
The beefy batsman bashed his first three-run blast in the top of the first inning, and drove in no less than five of his team’s 12 markers in the top of the second with another three-run jack and a two-run homer in that frame alone.
In the fire department’s biggest frame – that three-run bottom half of the third – Mague’s two-run double was the big smack.
The contest drew good crowds of spirited supporters for both teams, and the squads were later generously treated to pizza and drinks by the Londonderry Lions Club once their hard and hot work on the diamond had been completed as a thank you for all those two departments do for the community .