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SALT LAKE CITY — For Salt Lake Bees designated hitter Jabari Blash, Opening Day at Smith's Ballpark couldn't have gone any better.
Blash hit a tape-measure home run in the sixth inning as part of a three-hit night to help the Bees knock off the Albuquerque Isotopes, 9-3, on Thursday night.
"Awesome. It was good to see," Bees manager Keith Johnson said. "We got plenty of pitchers some work tonight. But I thought the guys did a good job of making pitches when they had to kind of limit them on the offensive side. That's a really good offensive ballclub over there and we were able to keep them to three runs."
Blash also scored three runs while collecting two RBIs for the Bees (1-0).
The Isotopes (0-1) got on the board first when Noel Cuevas hit an opposite-field home run that just cleared the right-field fence in the top of the first.
The Bees responded in the bottom half of the inning when Michael Hermosillo reached on an infield single, stole second base and then scored on a wild pitch to tie the game at one.
Salt Lake exploded in the bottom of the second, scoring four runs to take a 5-1 lead.
Albuquerque got a run back when leadoff hitter Raimel Tapia hit a tape measure shot to right field to make it a 5-2 game.
But the Bees responded in the bottom half of the third. Rymer Liriano and David Fletcher had back-to-back singles and both later scored in the inning to push the lead back to 7-2.
The Salt Lake bullpen then shut the door on the Isoptope offense. Albuquerque was able to put one more run on the board courtesy of Tom Murphy's home run in the top of the fourth.
The night belonged to the Bees, though. Blash hit a mammoth home run in the bottom of the sixth. The Bees then tacked on an insurance run in the bottom of the eighth inning on a Ben Revere RBI single that scored Blash, who had singled earlier in the frame.
Along with Blash's two hits, David Fletcher also finished with two hits while Jose Briceno had a team-high three hits. Along with Blash, Briceno and Revere each finished with two RBIs in the season-opening win.
Former BYU pitcher Taylor Cole came on in the seventh inning and worked out of a two-out jam and followed that up with a 1-2-3 eighth inning that included two strikeouts.
"I'm sure there was a little bit of jitters there being back in Utah for the first time in a while, but I thought he threw the ball really well," Johnson said of Cole. "He's one of those guys I was talking about. Got himself into a little bit of trouble but when he had to make pitches, he made some pitches and we played some good defense behind him."
Game two of the five-game series is Friday night with first pitch scheduled for 6:35 p.m MT at Smith's Ballpark.
