ROMM PHOTOGRAPHY
Green baseball standout Mark Zimmerman slides into home safely in the first inning to put the Bulldogs ahead of Willoughby South 2-0 early, but Green couldn't hold on to the lead and lost the regional championship 6-5.
CANTON, Ohio – Game by game, day by day, week by week over the past two months, the Green baseball team carefully built a path of stepping stones leading to Saturday’s Canton Division I Regional championship game at Thurman Munson Memorial Stadium against Willoughby South.
Each stone represented a comeback by the Bulldogs, and there were lots of them – sometimes two or three a game, many of which occurred during the 14-game winning streak the Bulldogs carried into Saturday.
No matter how dire the situation appeared, coach Jon Wallace’s guys never believed they were out of a game. More than that, they never even flinched. Maybe they didn’t care.
Or possibly they even liked it. It added some spice to things. It made things fun and daring.
And the tougher the situation, the more they embraced it. They would just chuckle, grab a bat and pound their way back into games with a bevy of hitters the likes of which compares favorably with any in the region.
Without trying to be trite and clichéd, they were the Rocky Balboa of local baseball, disillusioning teams with their refusal to stay down after getting knocked down, and their determination to always give out more punishment than they got.
But on Saturday, after having already rallied twice, they finally came up short, losing 6-5 to the Rebels in a game that was exciting as you’ll ever see, with more twists and turns than a good murder mystery. It was a classic in every sense of the word.
Right to the last pitch.
The Bulldogs almost pulled it off, stranding a runner at third as the game ended and keeping everybody – on both sides – holding their breath.
When they finally exhaled, the Bulldogs and their fans – and maybe to a certain extent even the Rebels, who knew full-well how resilient Green was – were almost disbelieving of the fact the team’s season was over. They were waiting for another chapter to this storybook season to be written. The book couldn’t end like that, could it?
Yes, it could, and did.
And when the reality of it all finally began to set in, it was emotionally painful to the Bulldogs to the point of tears.
“Obviously, this hurts,” senior Joe Ferrell said. “To come so far and to get so close and come up just short, it really hurts.”
While Green (23-5) was devastated, Willoughby South (24-5) was elated. The Rebels, who shut out Medina 1-0 in Friday’s semifinals, will be making only their second trip to the state tournament and their first since 1981, when Youngstown Boardman and some tally, gawky pitcher by the name of Bernie Kosar also made the Final Four. Both the Rebels and Spartans lost in the state semifinals that year, but now South has a second chance when it plays Thursday at 10 a.m. against Perrysburg at Huntington Park in Columbus, home of the Columbus Clippers, the Class AAA farm team of the Cleveland Indians.
The Bulldogs were so certain they were going to be the team going to Columbus.
They thought they were going after they put together three straight hits, including back-to-back doubles by senior Jacob Ramey and junior Mark Zimmerman, to go ahead 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning.
They thought they were going when, after the Rebels tied the score with single runs in the second and fifth, they scored in the fifth to make it 3-3 as Zimmerman’s double plated junior Bryce Miller, who had tripled.
They thought they were going when, after South seemingly took control by scoring three runs in the sixth on two walks, two singles, an error and a hit batsmen to go ahead 5-3, they answered with two runs on four straight singles by junior Hunter Handel, senior Kyle Zurz, Miller and Ramey, and a sacrifice fly by Zimmerman, to score twice to make it 5-5.
The rally was highlighted by a collision at home between Zurz, as he headed home on the sacrifice fly, and South’s Max Stohlman, knocking the ball out of the catcher’s glove after it appeared Zurz was going to be out.
And the Bulldogs thought they were going when, after the Rebels went ahead 6-5 in the seventh on a triple and a wild pitch, they systematically started their comeback in their half of the inning.
It began when junior Evan Keeslar led off with a single to center. He was sacrificed to second by senior Alex Ciocca and then went to third as Handel grounded out to the second baseman.
That left it up to Zurz, who had already showed why he was Green’s designated hitter by collecting two hits earlier in the game. This time, Zurz hit the ball hard between first and second, but first baseman Dom Federico went into the hole, fielded it cleanly and flipped it to pitcher Cameron Knott, who was covering, for the third out, officially punching the Rebels’ ticket to Columbus.
Knott, who had gone the distance in shutting out Medina, was brought in to pitch with one out and the bases loaded in the sixth. He gave up the sacrifice fly to Zimmerman then, after walking Ferrell, got Seth Curtis to fly to right to end the inning.
He then proceeded to work his way out of another tight spot in the seventh to improve his record to 8-1.
Zimmerman (5-1), who also went the distance Friday in a 5-3 win over Shaker Heights, was called upon to pitch the seventh. He did not appear to be as sharp as he was the previous day, but settled down nicely after the Rebels scored the go-ahead run.
“It’s not easy to pitch two days in a row like that, but he wanted the baseball,” Wallace said.
But Wallace thinks the seventh inning – and really, the latter part of the game overall – should have been a moot point.
“There were various points in the game where we were one hit away from breaking it wide open, but we just couldn’t get it,” Wallace said.
For one of the few times all year, the Bulldogs reached for that offensive magic and came up empty.
Said Ramey, who, like Ferrell, could barely get the words out through the emotion, “We needed that big hit today, but you can’t always come through.”
Even when you’re the Comeback Kids.