Baseball gods have no sympathy for Devils
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:09 AM PDT
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E-mail this articleColumn by Rick S. Alvord
At 2:35 p.m. Monday, the Lower Columbia College Red Devils were one strike away from winning the NWAACC baseball championship.
Four hours later, they watched with tears in their eyes as the Edmonds Tritons formed a human pigpile behind the pitcher's mound at David Story Field to celebrate the sixth title in school history.
Yes, this one will sting for a while.
It was a cruelest possible reversal of fortune for the Red Devils, who needed to win one game Monday to capture their 10th championship and the fifth for head coach Kelly Smith.
The baseball gods, however, didn't seem to care. When LCC came knocking on the door at 2:35, the gods didn't answer.
In fact, they must have been out back grilling Memorial Day burgers — with the Tritons as their invited guests.
Edmonds escaped a ninth-inning guillotine in the first game and tied it 3-3 on tourney MVP Dan Ninomiya's seeing-eye single up the middle, then patiently waited out a 4-3, 13-inning victory that featured more LCC mental miscues than you'll see in an entire season.
Ninomiya, Edmonds' cleanup hitter, delivered the tying run on a full-count breaking pitch from Devils closer Brooks Lindsley.
"The only thing I was thinking is that I didn't want to let my team down," said Ninomiya, who was nearly struck out by Lindsley earlier in the at-bat, but got a close call from the umpire. "I've never been in that situation before, where the entire season is right there on me. It feels good to be able to come through for my team."
And so for the first time since the tournament began on Thursday, the Devils' backs were planted firmly against the wall.
And again, the gods weren't answering.
Give Edmonds credit. Its 6-4 win in the do-or-die title game put the finishing touches on one of the grittiest comebacks in NWAACC history, a 22-inning day that featured diving catches and clutch pitching, timely hitting and aggressive baserunning.
The Tritons earned this one. That said, forgive the Red Devils if they feel like they didn't give their best performance on the grandest of NWAACC stages. Five errors in Game 2 will attest to that.
About 30 minutes after the final pitch, Smith and his coaches exchanged hugs and handshakes with the LCC players on the left-field grass. One by one, as the Devils retreated back to the dugout to pack their bags, a group of fans applauded and shouted their names.
"The kids are the ones I feel bad for. I wish this could have been a better experience for them," Smith said. "I didn't coach as well as I could have. I feel like I let them down."
Jett Hart, LCC's leadoff hitter and third baseman, was understandably in shock after Monday's setback.
"It's rough. I think the emotion on everybody's faces pretty much says it all," said Hart, who played his final game as a Devil. "Being one strike away ... some days things are going to end up on your side, some days they won't. That's baseball. Things just weren't right today."
In the 13-inning loss, the Devils failed to execute several sacrifice bunts and made some uncharacteristic mistakes. The biggest came in the bottom of the eighth with the Devils leading 3-2 and nobody out, when Lindsley - who reached on a two-base throwing error by Edmonds backup catcher Adam Ladwig - froze and failed to run to third on Luke Zirkle's sacrifice bunt.
Shawn Peterson flew out to deep center several pitches later. The sacrifice fly would have given the Devils a two-run lead heading to the ninth.
"I just think we wanted it too much," Smith said. "What did we have, five errors in the second game? But you know, we came a long ways after being 5-3 in league.
"I really appreciate all of the sophomores putting up with me for two years," he added. "The goal of all the yelling and screaming and cajoling is to make them better citizens and better students, and hopefully they'll learn something from the baseball experience. This is a good group of guys. I'm going to miss them."
Until Monday, the Devils hadn't lost back-to-back games all season. But after dropping the opener in such dramatic fashion, the momentum switched dugouts in Game 2.
And Edmonds rode Big Mo's shoulders to the championship.
Smith, as he is accustomed to do, will spend the next few weeks — maybe months — going over what he could have done differently to give his players "a better experience."
"This is a game of inches. One inch lower and Lindsley probably gets him (Ninomiya) to ground that ball back to the mound," Smith said. "But I'll still ride my mower and think about what I could have done better. Three months from now, I'll still wake up in the middle of the night and think about where it went wrong."
Sometimes, it's impossible to put your finger on exactly what went wrong.
Sometimes, the gods just don't answer the door.
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