By TERRY NAU

Sports editor

PAWTUCKET — Michael Bowden and three other PawSox pitchers stood tall on the mound against Indianapolis on Sunday, coming within one out of a combined no-hitter while stopping their team’s eight-game losing streak.
Larry Broadway broke up the no-hitter with a hard single off PawSox closer Fernando Cabrera that passed three feet to the left of second baseman Travis Denker’s glove. Cabrera then gave up a two-run homer on the next pitch to Tagg Bozied before getting the final out in a 3-2 Pawtucket triumph.
“The guys were pumped up (for a no-hitter) in the dugout,” PawSox manager Ron Johnson admitted after the game, “but the more serious issue for me was breaking the losing streak, getting a win.”
Javier Lopez, who got seven straight outs before handing the ball over to Cabrera with one man retired in the ninth, agreed with his manager.
“It’s funny how it almost took a no-hitter to get us out of this funk,” Lopez said. “I felt no disappointment in coming out of the game. ‘Cabby’ is our closer and he’s been doing a great job.”
Cabrera, who leads the International League with 17 saves, came in to face Broadway and threw ball one, then tried to slip a fastball past the lefthanded hitter. After that didn’t work, he tried to throw high heat past Bozied, who jumped on top of the pitch and drilled a long homer to left field.
“You’ve got to give credit to the hitter,” Johnson said. The manager then shook his head. “When you are three runs down and have a runner on base, you don’t often see a guy hacking on the first pitch. He’s not the tying run. But that’s baseball. He did the wrong thing and hit a home run so that makes it right.”
Pawtucket’s anemic offense, which is averaging 3.3 runs per game this season, struggled to score against Indianapolis starter Eric Hacker, who matched zeroes with Bowden for the first five innings. Johnson pulled Bowden after the fifth, bringing in T.J. Large to get three outs in the sixth.
In the bottom of the sixth, Paul McAnulty stroked a one-out double down the right field line. Chris Carter then singled to right, sending the beefy McAnulty to third base. With the infield pulled in, Aaron Bates chopped a grounder to shortstop. McAnulty made a good break down the baseline and discouraged the shortstop, Brian Bixler, from throwing home, eliciting a loud roar from the boisterous home crowd.
“This is the type of game we have to play,” Johnson said. “The last two nights, we’ve given up a lot of runs. We can’t keep up when the other team is scoring seven or eight runs. We need to pitch well and win the low-scoring games.”
Lopez came in for the seventh and got six outs over the next two innings, continuing his stellar pitching of late.
“Javy has that look about him,” Johnson said of the former big leaguer, who might find himself back in the big leagues soon, perhaps not with Boston but with another team that needs a lefthanded reliever.
Pawtucket, which is hitting .232 as a team, pushed across two important runs in the bottom of the eighth, runs that seemed like insurance at the time and proved very necessary following Bozied’s homer in the ninth inning.
Mark Wagner supplied those runs with a two-run bloop single over the drawn-in infield. The ball landed 10 feet on to the outfield grass in short right field. It was a clutch hit by the young catcher, who carried a .161 average into this game.
“That was a big hit for Mark,” Johnson observed.
After the game ended, players joked around in the locker room, more relaxed than they had been on the previous three evenings after frustrating losses to the Indians. Veteran pitcher Billy Traber kidded with the small media contingent, asking them why Bowden would want to talk to them. Like Lopez, Traber is a former big league reliever, lefthanded to boot, who is pitching well for Pawtucket. Maybe he finds himself in the back end of a trade later this month, too.
When Bowden got out of the shower, he was only too happy to analyze a performance that got him back on track after a few recent sloppy efforts.
“I’ve had 10 days off,” he said, “and we used that time to look at video of me on the mound,” said Bowden, a 22-year-old prospect whose ERA had risen from 1.00 in May to 3.38 in mid-July. “We found that I was getting too far over the (pitching) rubber and my arm was trailing behind me. Today, I just stood over the rubber and that gave me a chance to pitch more downhill, which is what I need to do.”
Bowden did walk three batters in his five innings of work.
“That wasn’t what I want,” he said, “but overall, I feel I accomplished some good things today.”
Bowden, the No. 2 pitching prospect on this staff behind Clay Buchholz, had a final thought on Sunday’s game, one that covered both the individual and team aspects of the contest.
“This takes some weight off my shoulders,” he said. “I was pressing a bit my last few starts. And it was a fun game to be involved in. It’s a lot more fun to win than to lose, I’ll tell you that.”
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EXTRA BASES: The PawSox begin a four-game road trip in Rochester tonight. Traber (5-4, 2.28 ERA) gets the start for Pawtucket. The PawSox return home Friday for a four-game homestand against Columbus before heading back to upstate New York for a series against Buffalo next week.