SoCon Baseball (May 20 - May 21)

It was a money saving effort by the conference, hopefully for this season only, due to Covid19.

This year's tournament kinda reminds me of the 2016 tournament when our pitching staff was also running on fumes.

Mercer was the #1 seed and had beaten us 2 of 3 games in Cullowhee during the regular season. We were #2 seed in the tournament in Greenville but we had encountered some serious pitching struggles throughout the year. We had great hitting and scored a lot of runs. A number of 9-8 and 12-11 games. Sound familiar?

We beat Wofford and Samford in first two games but had a heartbreaking one-run loss to Mercer (9-8) in our third tournament game.
Then we gave Samford their second loss and emerged from the loser's bracket; with the awesome task of having to beat Mercer twice on Sunday.
Bryan Sammons pitched a beautiful 7 innings and we won 4-2 in first game. We had few pitching options for the second game. B.J. Nobles had been a very effective Stopper/Closer all year long but he said, "Give me the ball."

B.J. gave up one run early but we came back and took a 2-1 into the 9th inning. B.J. got the first Mercer batter out but the next guy launched one that may still be in orbit. The next Mercer hitter also crushed one but Bryson Bowman was able to catch it before it went over the RCF fence. Coach Mo decided that BJ's 120 pitches were enough and he was pushing the envelope too far. So Colton Davis (our other Closer) came in to get the last out. (Davis had pitched the last two innings of the earlier game.)

Then in the bottom of the 9th, we got the bases loaded and Nobu Suzuki got hit by a pitch for a walk-off victory. The ball hit Nobu and he just stood there for a couple of seconds processing the situation before starting to celebrate and head down to 1B.

One of the grittiest performances by a Catamount baseball team in my memory. May it be so again...