Both the Austin Greyhounds and the Rochester Royals were guaranteed a place in the 16-team bracket of the 2002 Minnesota State Amateur Baseball Class B Tournament, but that didn’t keep them from being competitive.

The Greyhounds hosted Rochester Saturday night at Marcusen Park for a rematch of the Section 2B finals. The Royals, hoping to get the top seed from the section, needed to beat Austin to even have that chance. A Rochester victory would have forced a deciding third game, but both teams consented to a coin-flip instead of a rubber-match in the event of a Royals win on Saturday.

Austin had won four straight postseason games against the Royals, and Nick Rohne’s RBI-single in the bottom of the eighth inning put the Greyhounds on top of a 7-6 triumph at Marcusen Park.

&uot;Neither team was that concerned with the seed,&uot; said Greyhounds player/coach Joe Serratore. &uot;Everybody wanted to win, but we weren’t going to pull every string to win.&uot;

Austin used three pitchers and Rochester four as the two teams combined for 24 hits. In Tuesday’s 1-0 Greyhounds win at Rochester, both teams totalled just four hits, including Matt Cano’s game-winning home run.

&uot;Basically both teams got their pitchers some work and prepared for the state tournament,&uot; Serratore said.

Craig Selk hit a two-run homer to spark the Greyhounds in the fifth, and Serratore started the eighth with a leadoff single up the middle.

Rochester tied the score at 6-6 with runs in the top of the eighth, but Austin answered with the game-winner in the bottom half.

Garrett Swank pinch-ran for Serratore and moved up on Tim Kaplan’s grounder through the left side. Rohne found the same gap and drove in Swank as the game-winning run.

Dave Meyer tossed two scoreless innings of relief for the victory, while Rochester’s Brian Koch took the loss.

Serratore, Kaplan and Tate Cummins each had multiple hits for Austin, who assembled 14 hits in the win. Selk’s home run was his second of the season.