HarbourCats, Shamrocks in key playoff games
The Corvallis Knights, named after the wife of Nike co-founder Phil Knight and main team sponsor Penny Knight, won their fifth West Coast League baseball championship Tuesday night.
The South Division-champion Knights, playing in their ninth league playoff final in 11 years, defeated the North Divisionchampion Victoria HarbourCats 4-2 in the deciding Game 3 of the championship series at Goss Stadium in Corvallis, Oregon.
The HarbourCats, playing in their first league championship final in the five years of franchise history, won the first game at Royal Athletic Park before the Knights rallied for two consecutive wins and another league title.
Victoria had runners in scoring position to tie Game 3 in the top of the ninth inning with Taiwanese-import Po-Hao Huang on third base and Mississippi State slugger Harrison Bragg on second base with one out. But Noah Prewett and Justin Orton both struck out swinging for Victoria’s final two outs of the season.
“It was a frustrating way to end it, with two guys in scoring position in the ninth inning . . . we had two opportunities to bring them across, but could not get it done,” said HarbourCats head coach Brian McRae.
Victoria starter Blake Hannah (3-3) out of UC-Davis took the loss by giving up eight hits and four runs, three earned, with six strikeouts and no walks over six complete innings.
“We fought hard tonight and gave ourselves a good chance to win at the end,” said Hannah.
“But Corvallis had a deeper team than us in this final.”
Reliever Ethan Fox came in and allowed no hits and no runs with two strikeouts over two innings.
Corvallis starter Trenton Toplikar from UC-Riverside got the win by going seven complete innings with four hits and one run allowed.
But these kinds of season-ending moments, once the immediate disappointment passes for the losers, are also times to take the broader view.
“A lot of growth was accomplished this season and we established ourselves [as a force] in the WCL,” said McRae, the former 10-season major-leaguer, who was in the first year of a two-year contract with the HarbourCats.
The HarbourCats were chasing the first championship by a Victoria professional or summer-collegiate baseball team since the 1952 pro Victoria Tyees of the Western International League. It’s a lineage that goes through the New York Yankees farm-team Athletics and independent pro Tyees of the 1940s and 1950s, Northwest League Single-A Mussels and Blues of the late 1970s, and independent pro Capitals and Seals of the more recent past, heading into the summer-collegiate HarbourCats the past five years.