SKOWHEGAN — Casey Sudbeck learned to trust his curveball and his defense during the last couple of weeks of Hampden Academy’s regular season, which turned out to be bad news for Skowhegan on Tuesday.

Sudbeck scattered five hits over six innings and the ninth-seeded Broncos finally broke through against Skowhegan starter Brendan Curran in the fifth inning to beat the eighth-seeded Indians, 3-0, in a Class A North preliminary round game at Memorial Field.

Hampden (9-8) advanced to face rival and top-seeded Bangor in the quarterfinals Thursday. Skowhegan finished 9-8.

Andrew Gendreau worked around the second of two Hampden errors in the seventh to close it out.

“The big thing is the last couple of weeks he’s really started throwing his curveball for a strike and gotten a lot of confidence in that,” Hampden coach McLean Poulin said. “We told him attack the zone and let the defense do the work, and both of those things happened today.”

“I definitely tried to mix the curveball in today,” Sudbeck said. “That’s something I really hadn’t been doing during the season but I did today and it worked pretty well. That was probably the best defensive game we played this year.”

Hampden committed two errors, one a bad pickoff throw by Sudbeck. But it also made nice running catches on some hard line drives that might have otherwise found a gap.

Perhaps the biggest was Billy Campbell’s diving catch in left field to rob Adam Turcotte of extra bases for the second out of the second inning in what was still a scoreless game. The next batter, Marcus Christopher doubled, but Sudbeck was able to put another zero on the scoreboard by getting Garrett McSweeney to ground out to short.

“I’m not going to lie, I was a little nervous. The last couple of times we played at this field, we booted it around a few times,” said Poulin, whose team lost to the Indians, 6-5, at Memorial Field on May 3. “I told them as long as we stayed focused every play and every pitch, we’d be all set. They did a phenomenal job of that today.”

Curran stranded at least one Hampden runner in each of the first four innings, including an escape from a second-and-third, one out jam in the fourth, before a moment of indecision cost the Indians’ defense in the fifth.

With the bases loaded and two out, Alex McKenney hit a pop fly behind second. The shortstop retreated and the center fielder charged in pursuit, but no one called for the ball and it dropped between them, which allowed Jackson Gilmore and Sudbeck to score the game’s first two runs.

“We did catch a little bit of a break with those two runs. I’m not going to lie,” Poulin said. “But it’s all a matter of putting the ball in play and letting things happen.”

“I knew we were going to get (a run) eventually. I wasn’t sure when, but I’m glad we got it,” Sudbeck said.

Sudbeck rendered McSweeney’s one-out single in the bottom of the fifth harmless with a strikeout and pop out, then he wiggled out of his toughest spot of the game in the sixth.

Issac Witham doubled with one out. Kyle Dugas followed and hit a line drive down the left field line that just missed clearing the fence in fair territory by a few feet. He then singled to put runners at first and third. But Sudbeck won a long battle with Cameron Doucette by getting him to pop out in front of the mound, then ended the threat by inducing a ground out to second by Turcotte.

“They found the holes and we didn’t, basically,” Skowhegan coach Michael LeBlanc said. “That’s the way baseball is, you get a bounce here and a bounce there. We’re two feet away from tying it with a home run. We played well enough to win. We just didn’t find the grass and they did.”

Hampden added an insurance run in the seventh when Gilmore from second on a pitch in the dirt that bounced all the way to the front of the Broncos’ dugout.

Randy Whitehouse — 621-5638

rwhitehouse@mainetoday.com

Twitter: @RAWmaterial33