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Cavs fall to La Plata, miss out on share of SMAC crown
Friday, May 9, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by GARY SMITH
Calvert’s Michael Mohler was caught stealing second as La Plata shortstop Jordan McGraner awaits the throw. The Cavaliers fell to the eventual SMAC champs, 3-1.
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That described the final week of baseball’s regular season for the La Plata Warriors, which were a perfect 14-0 and ranked fourth in the metro area with a stranglehold on the Southern Maryland Athletic Conference race.
La Plata’s invincibility was dashed with upset losses to a pair of sub-.500 teams April 29 and 30, opening the door for the surging Calvert Cavaliers to steal the SMAC title in Tuesday’s regular season finale between the league’s top two teams.
And visiting Calvert was in position to do so with a late lead until a struggling La Plata offense engineered a sixth-inning rally, plating all of its runs in a gritty 3-1 comeback victory.
The late-inning heroics enabled La Plata (16-2, 14-2 SMAC) to clinch its first SMAC title since 2000 in front of a large fan turnout.
The Warriors held off a Calvert club (12-6, 12-4) that would have claimed the league banner on a head-to-head tiebreaker with the Warriors had it not relinquished a 1-0 lead.
‘‘The emotions have been like a rollercoaster – when we lost the games we were down, but this [SMAC title] has gotten us right back up. I think we deserve it as hard as we work,” said La Plata senior center fielder Mark Anderson, whose team now heads into the playoffs as the No. 1 seed in the 3A South Region. ‘‘[Calvert] is a good team. They gave us our money’s worth in this game, and that’s real good for our team. We have good momentum going into the playoffs, now. [The last week] was a little scary, but it’s definitely what we needed.
‘‘It shows we can work through tough situations and come back.”
La Plata senior catcher Ross Hunsberger echoed, ‘‘I’d say we’ve been through an emotional rollercoaster the past couple weeks. I think it’s terrible that we actually had to lose those few games to realize how important the season was to us. We really, really wanted this game [against Calvert] extremely, extremely bad.”
La Plata head coach Dan DeVitis added: ‘‘What I’ve been trying to get across to the kids is it’s very hard to be undefeated in any sport. And we were down. The thing I like about [how the SMAC was decided] is there can’t be any questions. The two teams that were on top met.”
La Plata was limited to just one hit – on a first-inning bunt single – before the sixth by one of the SMAC’s top pitchers.
Calvert lefty Brandon Crigger escaped a bases-loaded, no-outs jam in the first unscathed and stranded seven runners through five.
Crigger retired eight straight batters from the second through fifth and frustrated La Plata to 0 for 8 with runners in scoring position until he was scored on.
In the sixth following a leadoff walk, La Plata finally cracked Crigger with Anderson’s double, slapped just beyond the reach of the third baseman down the left-field line.
The Anderson at-bat came on a 0-2 pitch and provided La Plata with runners on second and third with nobody down.
‘‘It was an inside curveball,” Anderson said of the pitch he went after for La Plata’s first hit to leave the infield. ‘‘I just stuck in there. I didn’t hit it real well, but it found its way through.”
Hunsberger followed by lacing an RBI single to center field that scored Mike Boyden with La Plata’s first run to knot the contest. After fanning in his two previous at-bats, Boyden sparked La Plata’s big sixth by working Crigger for a walk on seven pitches.
After his hit, Hunsberger was sacrificed to second with Anderson staying at third. That set the table for Brett Irwin’s one-out single that drove in both runners to give La Plata a 3-1 lead, the eventual outcome.
‘‘There are 11 other [SMAC] teams that wish they could be right here where we’re at, and there were only two teams that had a chance to win [the SMAC title],” Calvert head coach Travis Mister said about the heartbreaker, six outs away from a league banner. ‘‘That [La Plata] team is as advertised. They’re a very good team, senior-oriented. They did exactly what they had to do to win the ballgame. Give them credit.
The RBI hit was vindication for Irwin.
La Plata’s starting pitcher who lasted 4 1⁄3 innings and yielded Calvert’s run before giving way to reliever Jordan McGraner, who was the game’s winning hurler after throwing the final 2 2⁄3 frames of scoreless work.
The Calvert run – produced in the fourth when Doug Kletter belted an RBI single to score Vinnie Bowles, on base with a leadoff hit – was the first earned tally surrendered by the stingy Irwin all season.
‘‘Amazing – that’s the one word to sum it all up – it feels amazing,” said a thankful Hunsberger, who had never previously won a SMAC championship before in any of his three sports – which also includes football and basketball – before Tuesday. ‘‘Crigger is one of the best pitchers we’ve seen thus far. We were hitting the baseball, just right to people. We had a couple of deep shots here and there. We knew they would drop, eventually.
‘‘Mark had that spark – that one hit – and hitting is very contagious in baseball.”
‘‘He kept us completely off-balanced by changing speeds a lot and moving it in and out well,” Anderson said of Crigger, who hides the ball effectively during his pitching delivery. ‘‘We finally started catching on in the sixth inning and put a few hits together. Luckily, our pitching was real good and kept us in the game.”
Crigger fanned nine batters while allowing four hits, but he had no strikeouts after the fourth.
‘‘He may have gotten a little bit tired, but nothing special,” Mister said of Crigger in the sixth. ‘‘Maybe he missed one or two spots here and there, and good teams capitalize on that. We didn’t give it to them – they earned all three runs.”
In relief, McGraner allowed two hits, including one of the leadoff variety. That base hit was negated in the seventh on a double play.
‘‘Definitely, definitely,” DeVitis said of McGraner being the unsung hero. ‘‘The one at-bat he had 11 pitches thrown to him. He worked the count like a leadoff man is supposed to do.”
