LUTZ- I love baseball as much as the next guy but the line has to be drawn at some point. And it seemed like that point was never coming Thursday night or it seemed that way until the regional quarterfinal match between Steinbrenner and Brandon reached the bottom of the 16th inning.
After facing another bases loaded situation with one out, Steinbrenner and company knew there weren’t going to be many chances left with the FHSAA’s 11 p.m. deadline coming up to finish the game by. So Brandon Johnson took a ball for a shallow blooper ride to left field, with Ryan Fatzinger following up with a sacrifice bunt that would move Johnson to third after a stolen base. With prior experience in the bottom of the 14th inning, the Eagles intentionally walked both Drew Burkhart and Andrew Lindsay hoping to get another lucky break on a double play. Chase DeBonis hit into a fielders choice which trapped Johnson at home, thus moving all runners up a base. So it came to Colby Burchardt for the second time in the same situation, minus an out from the last time up, and he waited for a game winning pitch down the middle for which he could drive to the fence. It never came. But what did arrive was a ball in the dirt bouncing off the Brandon catcher allowing a hesitant Burkhart to run home despite a late jump.
Normally, on such a bad jump and a unlucky bounce for Steinbrenner, Burkhart would have been out by a mile. But the catcher not knowing how soon Burkhart would arrive at the plate, turned quickly and overthrew the ball over the covering pitcher’s head allowing the Warriors to yet again, win a playoff game on a walk off, extra innings, error, play.
“I got lucky I guess. I kind of hesitated but then I realized that it (the ball) was going through,” said Burkhart. “It’s do or die and I had to do it.”
But the only reason any of this happened was because of the phenomenal pitching duel that was shown. With a total of 34 combined strikeouts for all four pitchers, and eight innings of pitching a piece for the Warriors two guys with Brandon giving their starter seven and the relief, nine, every at-bat came down to “would this be the one”.
So after close to four hours, the combined effort of CJ Van Eyk (over 100 pitches) and Andrew Lindsay (around 80 pitches) managed to outlast and out pitch the vising Brandon Eagles for a big win giving themselves one more home game in the regional semi-finals Tuesday night against a team TBD.
“I don’t know what I feel right now,” said Head Coach John Crumbley. “We were looking at their pitch counts and CJ’s got up there but he said he wanted the ball in the eighth and we gave it to him. Andrew’s was awesome tonight. I’m just glad we didn’t have to go to our other guy, Ryan Fatzinger.”
Written by Evan Abramson/Online Sports Editor
