AquaSox ride big bats, clutch pitching to Game 3 win

EVERETT — The ball was loud off the bat as it hooked high towards left field.

The crowd at Funko Field rose to its feet. A few pitchers in the Everett AquaSox bullpen stood and made large sweeping motions to the right, pushing, fanning, willing the ball to stay fair. If it did, AquaSox third baseman Luis Suisbel would give his team a 4-3 lead against the Eugene Emeralds in Game 3 of the 2025 Northwest League Championship Series on Friday, just moments after outfielder Jonny Farmelo tied it up with a two-run homer.

Instead, the ball slipped foul. The crowd noise simmered as people slowly sat back in their seats. Suisbel struck out swinging on the next pitch.

“I was only (trying) to focus, you know,” Suisbel said. “So that happened, but we need to keep going. We need to try to help the team.”

The 22-year-old did just that in his next at-bat.

After shortstop Felnin Celesten singled and designated hitter Matthew Ellis walked in the fifth inning, Suisbel came back to the plate. He missed on the first two pitches, dealt outside the zone by Emeralds starter Cesar Perdomo. Suisbel had to spin his head away from the third pitch, thrown high and inside.

Perdomo went back to the outside on his fourth pitch, but this time Suisbel timed it up, pushing it down the first-base line and into the right field corner. Celesten and Ellis went around to score as Suisbel rolled into third, punctuating it with an emphatic fist pump, followed by bumping both wrists against his hips and another fist pump as the Funko Field crowd roared.

A few pitches later, Suisbel scored from third on a Eugene wild pitch, bringing the score to 6-3. After narrowly missing an opportunity to take the lead earlier in the game, he seized it the next time around.

“They (have) a good team, and you need to be focused all game to be ready,” Suisbel said. “You never know when you get a ground ball or something about it, so that’s what happens.”

Each side scored two more runs down the stretch, and while the Emeralds put themselves in threatening positions to tie the game late, the AquaSox bullpen hung on for an 8-5 win, taking a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five series.

It was an outcome that didn’t seem likely once the Emeralds took a 3-0 lead in the top of the first.

Leadoff hitter Jean Carlos Sio reached first and advanced to second on a throwing error from AquaSox second baseman Carter Dorighi, and outfielder Jonah Cox laid down a bunt to get Sio over to third while reaching first himself. First baseman Charlie Szykowny stepped to the plate and rocketed a three-run homer to right-center.

Immediately, starter Evan Truitt was in a hole before even getting an out, but after allowing a single to third baseman Parks Harber following the Szykowny homer, he retired the next three batters to end the inning.

“It’s the first inning, so you can always overcome a big inning like that,” Truitt said. “There’s eight more innings, so all I tried to do was keep throwing strikes, and you get three outs after that and then give the offense a chance.”

Given the chance in the bottom of the frame, Farmelo provided a quick response. Following Celesten’s walk with one out, Farmelo sent a triple off the left field wall to quickly cut it to 3-1.

“It’s huge,” AquaSox manager Zach Vincej said. “It gets the energy up in the dugout, you know, because you can kind of feel it as like, ‘Man, we made a mistake early on.’ Ideally, you don’t want to make that, but it’s part of the game. So a big hit and a guy that runs the bases hard, you know, that can spark the team. So Jonny’s been that guy for us.”

After each side stranded two runners in the second, Truitt mowed down three straight batters after a leadoff walk in the third, and Farmelo tied the game 3-3 with his first homer of the postseason following a Celesten single.

Farmelo spent much of the past two seasons working back from injuries, appearing in just 75 professional games since he was selected 29th overall by the Seattle Mariners in the 2023 Draft. Once he was activated from a rib fracture on Aug. 9, missing nearly two months of the 2025 season, Farmelo still had to work back to game speed.

Across 14 games to close out the regular season, Farmelo went 9-for-54 (.167) at the plate with eight walks and 18 strikeouts. But when his team needed him most in Game 3, he stepped up and delivered.

“We couldn’t care less about the regular season and the last few series of the year,” Farmelo said during the on-field postgame interview. “We just flushed it and dialed in, and we’re rolling, man. …

“I’m just blessed to be here. I think I took a lot for granted before I got hurt, and then I learned – kind of when I got hurt – that this is really a blessing to do this for a living.”

After Suisbel gave Everett the lead in the fifth, Charlie Pagliarini extended it to 7-3 with a sacrifice fly in the sixth, and Celesten pushed it to 8-3 with an RBI double in the next at-bat.

AquaSox reliever Jose Geraldo got into trouble in the seventh after pitching a clean sixth, allowing four straight base hits to open the frame. The latter two were RBI singles from Szykowny and Harber to cut it to 8-5.

With no outs and runners on the corners, reliever Casey Hintz took the mound and proceeded to retire the next three batters, two via strikeout, to maintain the three-run lead.

Hintz, a 21-year-old righty selected in the 16th round of the 2025 Draft in July, was promoted to Everett on Sept. 2, making two regular season appearances. Put in a tough spot on Friday, the “new guy” proved his worth.

“It’s just that bulldog mentality that they went in,” Vincej said. “Great job by Casey on that. It was a big-time spot for him. We’ve only seen him pitch a couple times with us, so he’s really stepped up in a huge way for us, and just to get out of that — first and third, nobody out — get some ‘punchies’ and keep the line moving for us, that completely changed the momentum.”

Hintz returned to the eighth, where Eugene’s only base-runner came from a fielding error by Pagliarini at second base. Cox grounded into an inning-ending force out in the next at-bat to avoid any drama.

That would be saved for the ninth, when Calvin Schapira came in for the save. It started rocky, as he hit Szykowny with his very first pitch and walked Harber to set the Emeralds up with two base-runners and the tying run at the plate.

Following a mound visit, Schapira dialed in and struck out the next three batters, throwing just three total balls in 13 pitches across the three at-bats. After punching out designated hitter Jack Payton to secure the win, Schapira let out a big yell as the AquaSox dugout emptied onto the field.

“The pitching’s been, I think, pretty good all year,” Truitt said. “We had a lot of confidence coming in with the bullpen, especially (the) back-end, so it was expected, and they did their job.”

Entering the series as the underdog to the red-hot second-half champion Emeralds, Everett faces an opportunity to clinch the Northwest League Championship on home turf. First pitch is at 7:05 p.m. on Saturday.