The Redmond High baseball team’s season ended with a bloop, but the future looks bright.
A bloop single in the seventh inning ruined the Mustangs’ hopes of playing at Safeco Field for the first time.
T.J. Horsfall’s check-swing single in the top of the seventh inning drove in the winning run as the Eagles beat the Mustangs, 6-5, in a Class 4A state quarterfinal contest at Kent Memorial Stadium on Saturday.
The loss ends a solid season for the Mustangs, who won the 4A Kingco title and finished with a 19-6 record. The Mustangs had won eight straight before the season-ending loss and were ranked second in the state.
Looking back on one of the best seasons the program has seen under his tenure, Redmond coach Dan Pudwill will remember his 2010 team for their skill, and tenacity when things weren’t going quite right.
“It may not have a been a real deep team, but we were extremely talented at a lot of positions,” he said. “Also resiliency. We seemed to win a lot of baseball games when we had some things throughout the season that were internally difficult to handle, and the kids addressed them, overcame them, and moved on.”
The Mustangs lose six seniors off their roster, including defensive wizards Josh Bircher and Matt Kimmel as well as a starting catcher in Ryan Beliel. But a number of their impact players will return, boding well for another potential state run in 2011.
“It’s tough to get Saturday out of my mind, the way we went down, but one of the ways we move on is to look forward,” Pudwill acknowledged. “We’ve got four kids that have played varsity for two years: T.J. Whidby, (Zach) Abbruzza, (Michael) Conforto and (Dylan) Davis, and certainly we’ll look to those kids to be our leaders. They did quite a bit of that this year.”
It looked good for Redmond early in the game against Federal Way as the Mustangs jumped out to a 2-0 lead on Davis’ two-run double in the first inning. Redmond then added runs in the second, third and fourth to build a 5-1 lead.
In the top of the fifth, however, the Eagles struck back, taking advantage of two Mustang errors to score four runs on just one base hit, tying the game at 5-5.
The game winner came off the bat of Horsfall, a check-swing blooper over first base that scored pinch-runner Tanner Day from second base in the top of the seventh inning. Eagles reliever Austin Weber then pitched a scoreless seventh inning for the save.
“It was a tough game all around, a game that we thought we were in real good position to win,” recalled Pudwill. “We just had an inning where things happened that hadn’t happened to us all year. We didn’t take advantage of the situations when they were in front of us early in the game, and we gave them a chance to come back.”
In addition to Davis’ double, Michael Conforto went 2-for-3 with two RBIs and Zach Abbruzza hit an RBI double and scored twice.
The Mustangs’ quarterfinal loss was their third in a four-year stretch, as they lost to Richland in 2008, 11-5, and to Snohomish in 2007, 6-2.
In the first round on Saturday morning, Redmond won a 3-2 thriller over Gig Harbor, with the Mustangs scoring all three of their runs in the first inning, including Jake Levin’s two-run double.
Abbruzza scattered six hits in a complete-game win while striking out six and walking just two.
The Tides threatened in the bottom of the seventh with the tying run on second base before Conforto snagged a hard liner to end the game and earn a matchup against Eagles.
