It was nothing short of gut wrenching. The St. Anne’s-Belfield baseball team came into the VISAA Division I semifinals on a roll, hitting the ball hard and doing all the little things right. They were able to hit on Friday against Benedictine, but a pair of costly miscues in a game that was dominated by mistakes wound up going against the Saints. Behind a seventh inning 2-out rally, the Cadets brought STAB’s season to a halt with a 7-6 win.
“It’s heart breaking,” said St. Anne’s coach Alan Swanson. “But you can’t take away anything from (Benedictine). They played hard. We played hard. It was a great high school game between two great teams and they simply beat us.”
Both teams enjoyed 2-run leads at separate points, but neither could hold on. The Saints’ lead evaporated on a 2-run double from Chris Dyer in the third, and STAB cut the Cadets lead short on RBIs from a Kevin White single and Brett Johnson fielder’s choice in the bottom of the fifth to knot the game up.
In the top of the seventh, David Spinosa struck out the first two batters of the inning, and after surrendering a double, a pop fly out of the infield got lost in the sun for what would have been the third out. Benedictine’s Andrew Woods made the Saints pay for it in the following at-bat with a 2-run double to put his team up by two.
With their backs against the wall, White led off the bottom of the seventh with a double of his own, and took third on a sacrifice bunt before reaching home on a sacrifice fly. But that was all the Saints could muster as Woods ended the game with a strikeout.
“We respect them so much,” said Cadets coach Sean Ryan. “That’s a team that had won 20-some games in a row coming in and they never stop. That’s what we’ve tried to instill in our guys here. Neither team played their best defensively, we just happened to get a couple of breaks late and made them hurt.”
Benedictine scored in the first inning of the game off of a solo shot from Teddy Kozak, but STAB answered right back with an RBI single from White followed by an RBI single from Brian Yeagle. The next inning the Saints would go up 3-1 when Brett Johnson earned a walk, was advanced on an error before crossing the plate on another error.
In the top of the third the Cadets loaded the bases when a foul ball on the first baseline allowed them to tag two of their runners home to tie the game at 3-3.
White finished the game 3 for 4 with two RBI and two runs scored. Yeagle was 1 for 3 with an RBI.
