BOURNE, Mass. — With one quarter of the season left before Thursday, every game matters for Falmouth. And in a crowded West division, that especially rang true against division foes.

The Commodores hadn’t taken advantage of those matchups entering Thursday’s clash with Bourne. They’d gone 5-9 through 14 division games, including losing the last four. With the regular season winding down, that streak continuing would give Falmouth’s players a one-way ticket home.

A victory over the second-place Braves could mark the first step toward securing the ‘Dores’ playoff spot.

Instead, they simply took another step back. Falmouth (13-17-1) fell to Bourne (14-15-2) 6-5, propelled by the Braves’ four-run second inning and six runs across the first three frames. Despite an early slugfest, the duo of Jack Brown and WIll Whelan held Falmouth scoreless across the final five innings to seal its loss.

“It seems to be what it's been all year for us,” Falmouth manager Jarrod Saltalamacchia said postgame. “The games that we've lost have been one inning that’s killed us. So if you look at the scoreboard, the second inning killed us. We've got to overcome that.”

Previously, the Commodores hadn’t been helping themselves out, either. They hadn’t produced a winning streak since the beginning of the month. That extended with a 6-2 loss to Cotuit on Tuesday, when Falmouth starting pitcher Jaden Wywoda allowed four runs through 2 ⅓ innings, propelled by three errors.

Neither its pitching nor its defense improved. Falmouth came in with a league-worst 4.96 ERA. Jeremy Urena took the mound on Thursday, though wasn’t as sharp as his three scoreless innings versus Orleans in his first start.

His outing Thursday started a little differently. Bourne’s Ryker Waite practically created a run by himself in the first, with help from more poor Falmouth defense. He walked and advanced to third on a pickoff error by shortstop Adrian Lopez. Then, he trotted home to make it 1-0 after Urena spiked a breaking ball.

But Falmouth punched back.

On Tuesday versus Cotuit, its offense was nonexistent. Fortunately for the ‘Dores, they faced Bourne’s equally subpar pitching staff on Thursday, which entered ninth in ERA (4.70).

Early on, the Commodores feasted on the Braves’ Nate Whysong (Wake Forest). After one brief offensive outburst against the Kettleers, it took just two innings to break through on Thursday.

Lopez opened the second by smacking a double into right center, then Justin Osterhouse (Alabama) plated him by blooping an RBI single over second baseman Ryan Cooney’s head. The ‘Dores kept poking and prodding. They upped the score to 3-1 by the end of the frame, scoring on a Whysong wild pitch and Antonio Morales (Maryland) RBI groundout.

The Commodores could’ve built on their momentum. Instead, they continued to hurt themselves.

Two Lopez errors allowed Drew Wyers and Cal Sefcik to tie the game at three. Then, Waite and Braden Holcomb gave the Braves the lead back, 5-3, with two RBI singles. Bourne added a sixth run in the third when Jackson Vanesko, who entered for Urena in the third, balked in Sefcik from third.

“We can't let our pitchers stay out there and just keep pounding. Sometimes you’ve got to get four outs, but when you’ve got to get five, six, seven outs, that becomes an issue,” Saltalamacchia said of Falmouth’s three errors Thursday.

The game could’ve snowballed out of control. For the time being, though, the Commodores’ struggles didn’t transfer to their bats.

In the fourth, they came alive again. Falmouth pulled within one via a two-out double from Carl Schmidt — which hopped directly over third baseman Drew Wyers’ head — and single from Maika Niu.

The back-and-forth affair mirrored many of the Commodores’ matchups from earlier in the season. The flow deviated from there as pitching took over.

Bucknell’s Everett Garber, who followed Urena with four spotless frames in his debut, did just that again. He produced a 1-2-3 fourth inning, then seamlessly worked around Jon LeGrande reaching second in the fifth with three straight outs. Garber added two more scoreless frames across the sixth and seventh, including picking off Waite to end a brief threat.

Garber had given Falmouth a chance to take the lead back. But the Commodores, like Bourne, went quiet at the worst time. The dry spell propelled the Braves to victory.

Brown sat them down in order in the fifth, then, like Garber, he rebounded from allowing two leadoff baserunners to maintain Bourne’s 6-5 advantage in the sixth.

It was like a completely different team was in the batter’s box. Whelan kept the line moving. Despite runners reaching the corners in the seventh, he got Cayden Brumbaugh to fly out.

From there, Whelan finished the job by hurling a 1-2-3 eighth and worked around a leadoff walk in the ninth. The Commodores’ hopes had been dashed again.

The division loss was yet another setback. It acted as a dagger, killing any chance Falmouth had of building momentum toward the postseason and forcing it to grind through the final days of the campaign.

“We played some tough games and we've had some tough losses,” Saltalamacchia said. “We're trying to do too much at the plate, but I felt like we had good at-bats, they just made good pitches.”

Noah Nussbaum is the beat reporter for the Falmouth Commodores. You can read all of his articles on the Commodores here.