GARDINER – Winning your league is a worthwhile pursuit, no doubt, but teams often look at the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference championship as a playoff tune-up as much as a contest for bragging rights.
Seen in that context, Oxford Hills may need another check-up before its postseason begins next Thursday. Gardiner, meanwhile, looked ready to go, after its 7-0 win in the KVAC championship Friday at Hoch Field.
Helped by flawless defense, Mike Burdin tossed a four-hit complete game shutout, while Gardiner took advantage of four Viking errors to complete a season sweep of Oxford Hills.
Burdin struck out five, walked one and hit two batters, but he gave up one hit after the third inning.
“He was hitting his spots and keeping them off-balance, and I think that was the key,” Gardiner coach Jim Palmer said. “He was getting ahead of the hitters and we were playing good defense behind him.”
“I don’t want to take anything away from them because they’re excellent, but we pretty much lost the game,” said Vikings coach Shane Slicer. “They won the championship, but we killed ourselves.”
Two throwing errors in the third led to all the runs the Tigers would need. Craig Toulouse led off with an infield single to short and moved up to second on the first throwing error.
Eric Hachey followed with a single, but was forced out at second on a Nick Acheson grounder that Toulouse had to hold at third base on. A throwing error on Tom Colby’s grounder to third finally plated him, then Acheson scored on a double-steal with Colby to make it 2-0.
“We just tried to make things happen out there,” said Palmer. “For a while, nobody was getting on the board, so we were just trying to break the ice a little bit.”
A hit batter, another throwing error and Toulouse’s RBI single off Vikings starter Matt McDonnell made it 3-0 in the fourth. The Tigers put the game away with four in the sixth, the big blow a two-run single by Burdin.
“They’re very good once they get the momentum,” said Slicer, whose team lost to Gardiner earlier in the season, 9-2. “They did that to us last time. They got steamrolling, so at the plate, we started pressing a little bit trying to get something going, and (Burdin) never let us get anything going.”
Oxford Hills left four runners on through the first three innings.
The closest they got to scoring was in the second, when they put men on second and third with two outs. Burdin fanned Ethan Sutton to end the threat.
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