HAMMOND | Every baseball player knows that when you give a team extra outs, you’re more than likely going to pay for it.

That’s exactly what happened to the Hammond Chiefs on Tuesday night in their 5-2 defeat courtesy of the Norwood Blues.

Already down one run, the Chiefs (13-6) committed two costly errors on fly balls driven to the outfield, which scored Norwood’s second run, deflating Hammond in the process.

“There’s really no excuse for that,” Chiefs manager Dave Sutkowski said. “We’re good enough to put any lineup out there and those fly balls should have been caught. But those guys will be the first to admit it.”

The offense didn’t fare much better thanks to the pitching efforts of Norwood’s Billy Meyer and Nick Vidas, who scattered seven hits while striking out a combined six.

Hammond scored its only run through six innings in the third off the bat of Illiana Christian’s Tyler Sroczynski, who plated Lowell’s Miles Siedentopf on an RBI single.

After giving up three crucial runs in the top of the seventh, which ultimately did them in, the Chiefs’ rally was halted after a Cody Maskovsky RBI double.

“The offense really do too much tonight,” Sutkowski said. “We made some base-running mistakes and have to do a better job of getting guys in.”

Catcher Zac Maciejewski led the Chiefs with two hits.