After an up and down week – three straight wins followed by three straight losses – it was anybody’s guess as to which version of the Terrapin baseball team would show up last night against No. 15 Old Dominion.

When Monarch leadoff Jimmy Miles jacked the third pitch of the game over the scoreboard in leftfield, it appeared he had given the answer to that question. But Terp sophomore Nick Jowers had other plans.

Jowers answered Miles with his own lead-off homerun in the bottom of the inning, almost to precisely the same spot, and proceeded to go 3-for-4 in a 7-2 Terp win at Shipley Field.

“[A lead-off home run] puts you down right from the start,” Jowers said. “But when we can come out and hit one back with no outs, it’s a brand new ball game.”

Terp starter Mike Sufczynski understood that, and recovered quickly from his game-starting home run to Miles. He surrendered a second run in second inning, but after that he was golden, going a total of 5.2 innings with just two runs on five hits.

“[The home run] was only one run, and it’s happened before, so you try not to think about it,” said Sufczynski, who has now given up nine dingers on the season. “As a pitcher you have to block out everything. It’s just you and the catcher.”

His composure paid off, securing the sophomore his first win of the season and setting the stage for another shutdown performance by senior reliever Seth Overbey. In 17 innings this season, Overbey has compiled the best ERA on the team (3.33), and the Monarchs (31-5) were nothing but his latest target.

In 3.1 innings of relief, Overbey held the Monarchs – batting .327 coming into last night – hitless.

“He’s tough to hit throwing 90 mph from the side,” Sufczynski said. “His fastball is in the 90s, and then he floats his slider up there like a Frisbee, and they couldn’t hit it.”

Of course, the once-again stellar defense had a lot to do with the success of Sufczynski and Overbey. In the third inning with runners on the corners, junior Dan Melvin, playing short stop for a change, made a diving play to his left and flipped the ball to second baseman Joe Palumbo to begin an inning-ending, run-saving double play.

With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, first baseman Gerry Spessard got in on the action, fielding a nasty hop off of first base with his bare hand and flipping the ball to Overbey for the final out of the game.

Melvin and Spessard, usually the team’s leading offensive producers, left the majority of the hitting to some new faces. Mike Murphy (.221) and Chad Durakis (.213), statistically the worst of the Terps’ typical starting hitters, each had 2-for-4 nights with an RBI a piece.

As a whole the Terps (15-20) did a much better job of situational hitting than their nine-hit, one-run performance in their 4-1 loss to the Monarchs back on March 29.

“It was a tough loss because we made a lot of mistakes down there,” Jowers said. “Tonight we wanted it bad, because they made us look so bad that first game.”

Contact reporter Jason Fraley at fraleydbk@gmail.com.