AUBURN – They trailed, 7-2, midway through Monday’s Western Class C semifinal with Winthrop, but it turned out the St. Dom’s Saints were just getting warmed up.
The second-seeded Saints outscored the third-seeded Ramblers, 14-3, in the last two innings for a comeback 16-10 win that earned them a spot in their fourth straight Western Class C championship game. The defending state champions meet No. 1 Dirigo today at 3 p.m. at St. Joseph’s College.
The two teams combined for 20 hits and 23 walks. All nine St. Dom’s starters collected at least one hit, led by Brady Blackman, Richard Paradis and Will Emerson with two apiece. Ty Cobb had three hits to lead Winthrop’s eight-hit attack. Blackman and Winthrop’s Tavis Hasenfus, two of the top players in Class C, drove in four runs each.
The difference in the game may have been the Saints’ three starting freshmen, Casey Parker, Greg Labonte and Richard Paradis, who combined to go 4-for-7, with five walks, three well-placed bunts, seven runs scored and five batted in. In the pivotal eight-run fifth, Labonte had a big three-run double and Parker’s RBI single tied the game.
“We just wanted to chip away, get what we can,” Parker said. “We don’t try to get it all in one inning, but we did this time.”
The Saints (16-2) sent a dozen men to the plate in the fifth, chasing Winthrop starter Forrest Dwyer (four innings, six hits, eight walks, two Ks, seven runs) with the Ramblers clinging to a 7-5 lead. Reliever Kyle Plossay gave up a sacrifice fly to Tom Edgecomb and then Parker’s game-tying two-out single. Mike Carpenter (1-for-2, three walks, three runs, two RBIs) walked to load the bases for Blackman, who drilled one over the head of the center fielder for a bases-clearing triple that made it 10-7.
“My first two at-bats, I didn’t get a thing to hit. They were all on the outside corner and going away,” Blackman said. “That was the first pitch I saw all day middle-in and I turned on it.”
Winthrop (12-4) chased Saints starter Andy Allen (five innings, six hits, seven walks, one K, eight runs) the next inning when Rusty Schmelzer’s sac fly made it a 10-8 game. But Edgecomb came on in relief, and the Saints picked a Rambler off first with a trick pickoff play, and Edgecomb stranded two runners to keep St. Dom’s on top.
The Saints played small ball in the sixth to add to their lead. Paradis, who laid down a bunt single in the fifth, repeated the feat again in the sixth off reliever Hasenfus. Edgecomb followed with a bunt single of his own to load the bases, and Will Emerson drove a pair home to make it 12-6. The Saints bunted two more times in the inning, once for a sacrifice and once on a squeeze, and plated four more runs.
“I wanted to put pressure on them,” Saints coach Bob Blackman said. “We hit the ball hard, but their outfield was making plays, so I wanted to scrap across as many runs as we could get, whether it was one, two, three. It just turned out to be a lot more than I expected.”
“It couldn’t get much uglier than it did there in the sixth, could it?” Winthrop coach Marc Fortin said. “We lose a little when we put Tavis on the mound. We lose his experience behind the plate. I thought maybe I should have brought him in with the bases loaded (to face Blackman). They had a couple of key hits, but the little bunts and the suicide squeezes…They executed.”
Schmelzer (two hits) clubbed a two-run double in the seventh, but that was as close as the Ramblers would get against Edgecomb.
“Last year, we had a team that just liked to pound the ball. This one, we have four freshmen,” said Bob Blackman. “We’re pretty young, so we’ve had to adjust our team all year long. But we’re at the point now where we’re pretty comfortable with who we put on the field.”
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