Telegraph photo by TOM KING New Hampshire Prospects infielder Tyler Michaud looks to be waiting for Nashua Defenders' Max Mello, but Mello slid around the tag to steal second during his team's playoff-clinching 8-4 win Wednesday at Holman Stadium.

NASHUA – The Nashua Defenders hope the sins of the past don’t become the sins of the future.

That’s because after Wednesday’s 8-4 win at Holman Stadium over the New Hampshire Prospects White, there actually is a future for the locals as they basically clinched a playoff berth in the league they helped create, the New Hampshire COVID Baseball League.

“Obviously like I told the kids, it feels good to win, we should be happy that we won,” Defenders manager Tim Lunn said. “But it’s not something we should be satisfied with.

“For the last couple of weeks we’ve played well defensively, really clean. But today was like we played for the first two or three weeks. We can’t revert back to that. … We have to be better.”

And those weeks contributed greatly to the fact Nashua is just 8-10-1 and has allowed 55 unearned runs this season. All four Prospects runs were unearned thanks to three Nashua miscues.

But they’re in, either as the seventh or eighth seed and the eight-team playoffs start next Friday, three rounds of best of three series. The Defenders overcame a miscue-filled three-run Prospects second inning which erased a 2-0 lead, came back to tie the game in the bottom half and went on to take a 6-3 lead by turning the tables and taking advantage of Prospect mistakes in the fourth.

Key blows: A Dan Trzepacz sac fly in the second, and a Will Brooks two-out, two-run single in the fourth. A Hayden Shattuck RBI hit made it 7-4 in the fifth and another run scored on a wild pitch in the sixth.

“We’re just ready to go, ready to go to the playoffs,” Brooks said. “We returned a lot of players (from last year’s Legion state champs), but we also lost some key players. But I feel like we’ve been working hard to do what we can.

“We’ve got a lot of guys that are playing well; we’ve got to just keep playing the way we’ve been playing.”

One of those playing well has been Trzepacz, who is just swinging a mean bat. Yesterday he went 2 for 2 with a double, RBI and two runs scored. His one-out double keyed the team’s two-run first.

“He’s seeing the ball really well, putting good swings on there,” Lunn said. “He’s putting good swings on there. He’s not chasing a lot of pitches. When you’re not chasing, and can let the ball come to you, let the game come to you, it’s very easy to hit.”

As Lunn said, offense isn’t a concern. The Defenders have been averaging anywhere between seven and 12 hits a game, and their pitchers – Henri Boudreau got the win with five innings of no earned runs and Corey O’Day got the save – have a sub-3.00 earned run average.

Alex Meesig and Louis Rosenthol each had two hits and an RBI to lead the visitors. The Prospects (8-9), losers of six straight, just couldn’t take advantage of those breaks. In fact, they committed a key error of their own at first base that allowed Nashua to grab that 6-3 lead.

“We always have at least one half inning when we can’t get out of our own way,” Prospects manager Juan Amador said. “It’s hard to watch, we were 8-3 to start the season.”

And it’s been the opposite for Nashua.

“First half of the season was not good,” Lunn said. “Second half of the season we had to be way, way better. They’ve embraced that and we’ve done what we needed to do.”

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