For the first time in five years, a shot at the state championship game awaits No. 5 seed Mingus Union High School after rallying from a 6-0 deficit Saturday, May 7, for an 8-7 victory.
“They’ve ratcheted it up,” head coach Bob Young said after advancing to his first baseball semifinal since 2011. “They’ve got a lot of confidence right now and are playing well as a team.”
The road to the Division III title at 6 p.m. on Friday, May 13, goes through top seed Alhambra High School, whom the Marauders [24-7] handed its only home loss of the season, 3-1, three weeks earlier.
“I’m sure they’re going to be fired up, because they want payback,” Young said. “I don’t care who it is; it’s all about getting to the state championship.”
Junior Mitchell Lindsay made the difference then, driving in two runs on a sixth-inning double.
His two-out RBI double in the fifth inning May 7 tied fourth-seeded Kofa High School before he would take over on the mound and earn the win the next inning.
“That’s crazy,” said junior catcher Gus Henley, who singled to begin the seventh inning and would later score to tie the game. “It’s surreal. Outstanding. No one hung their heads.”
With a win, the Marauders would play the winner of San Luis and Sahuarita high schools for the Division III state championship Saturday, May 14, at 7:30 p.m.
“It feels great,” senior Zack Abrigo said after tying the game on a triple, then scoring the game-winning run with two outs in the seventh inning. “We haven’t been there in a while.”
Abrigo scored on a wild two-out throw by the Kofa catcher over his first baseman’s head, capping the Marauders’ second rally in the top of the seventh inning after Abrigo crushed a triple nearly 400 feet to deep center field.
“Coach always tells me to look for a fastball early in the count,” he said. “I just saw a fastball coming in, right down the middle, and hit the fastball.”
While Young has played tough cards with his playoff pitching, he indicated either Abrigo or sophomore Jordan Huey would start on the mound May 13.
If Huey gets the call, the left-hander will need more of the stuff from his April 18 complete-game win and much less from a second straight shaky postseason start against the Kings.
Huey scattered six hits but allowed just one fourth-inning RBI single at the top-ranked Lions.
He would record just seven outs May 7 against Kofa, allowing three earned runs in the first inning and three more in the third before giving way to senior Fernando Chavez.
But the Marauders earned their comeback one hit at a time, starting with Gus Henley in the fourth inning. The junior catcher beat out an infield hit, advanced to second base after Abrigo was hit by a pitch, then scored on an RBI single by sophomore Andrew Kulis.
“If it was in the sixth, that’s one thing,” Young said. “We just needed to get some runners on base, get a couple runs here, a couple runs there — [in] high school baseball, anything can happen.”
Courtesy runner Bradley Howard came in for Lindsay at first base after he also was hit to load the bases before Chavez’s triple cleared them all.
“A lot of guys like Mitchell [and] Chavez had big at-bats,” Young said.
With two outs in the top of the fifth inning, Abrigo was hit by a second pitch.
Another Kulis single advanced him to third before Lindsay’s double deep down the left-field line scored them both.
Although Chavez lasted the longest of the three Marauders pitchers against hard-hitting Kofa, he would give up a fifth-inning triple to put the Marauders back in the hole, 7-6. After walking his second straight leadoff batter in the sixth, he gave way to Lindsay, who would keep Kofa off the scoreboard the rest of the way.
“It’s too bad, because I don’t like it a bit,” Young said, only half-joking. “We’ve had to come back, these last two games. I wish we’d just play from the lead.”
Sparkling infield defense helped, as Abrigo knocked down a hard ground ball at first base, flipping the ball to Lindsay for the first out, before sophomore Tyler Kelly handled two hard hits to third base, including the second out he stabbed out of mid-air at the peak of his jump.
“In practice, our coaches always tell us, ‘Keep your head in the game,’” Abrigo said. “‘Get an out every time the ball gets put in play.’
“That’s what we do. That’s how we stay in the game.”
For more photos, please see the Wednesday, May 11, issues of the Camp Verde Journal and Cottonwood Journal Extra.
