Staff photo by Travis Rosenau New Ulm VFW Silver’s Owen Castleman slides into second and is tagged by Fairmont Junior Legion’s Merritt Pomerenke as they await the call Thursday night at Mueller Park.

NEW ULM — The New Ulm VFW Silver baseball team benefited on a handful of early errors and shook off a few of their own in the middle of the game Thursday night to take down Fairmont Junior Legion 12-7 at Mueller Park.

Silver sent five pitchers to the mound on Thursday, giving Owen Castleman the start and letting him finish the first inning with two strikeouts and one walk allowed. Ryler Collins pitched the second inning for Silver, while Porter Jensen pitched the third and fourth innings, Kaden Stueber pitched the sixth and Noah Gode took the mound in the seventh.

Silver didn’t go with five pitchers due to any of them being in trouble, however. While Silver did get into some trouble when Fairmont tied the game up at 5-all in the fourth, Silver head coach Jeff Ferrell and his players were also readying themselves for a tournament in Brookings, South Dakota, which begins with two games on Friday and continues into the weekend.

“We have a tournament this weekend, we have a doubleheader tomorrow and a doubleheader Saturday, and who knows what we’re going to do on Sunday,” Ferrell said. “So the first two guys that pitched … they’re gonna pitch on Saturday, so they were just getting a little bullpen time. And the three guys that came in after haven’t thrown at all, so they did a great job. Yeah, they were a little nervous, but at the end of the day I thought they did a nice job. They threw strikes and the inning they scored their four runs, it was four runs that had nothing to do with [our pitchers]. We just didn’t make the plays defensively.”

In the bottom of the fourth, Silver batted around and got seven runs back, led by an RBI single from Parker Ranweiler, who finished with a 3-for-3 night at the plate, and an RBI single from Trevan Thordson.

Silver ended up being outhit 8-7 in the game, but they got enough clutch hits and heads-up base running to counter that and pull out the win.

“At the end of the day, the kids do a nice job of bouncing back,” Ferrell said. “We gave up four runs and then we put up a seven spot up in the [bottom of the inning] because we can put the ball in play. These kids do a great job of flushing it, so to speak, and moving on to the very next thing.”

New Ulm started the game by capitalizing on three Fairmont errors and some timely hitting. Owen Castleman led off the inning with a double before a walk to Parker Ranweiler and a single by Collins made it a 1-0 game. An error scored another run for Silver and allowed Thordson to reach before a walk to Evan Starke filled the bases. Collins came home on a wild pitch and a groundout by Connor McAlpine made it a 4-0 game.

Fairmont got a run back in the second and four in the fourth to tie it before New Ulm’s big seven-run bottom of the fourth put Silver back in control. Fairmont got two more runs in the seventh, but a 1-2-3 sixth inning pitched by Stueber kept Silver in charge. Gode took the mound and allowed a leadoff single in the seventh, but he got a flyout and back-to-back groundouts to finish the game.

Collins finished the game 2 for 4 with two RBIs.