Rocky Mountain-Mountain Vista game of 5A baseball unbeatens suspended until Tuesday.
Cherry Creek, Broomfield win to remain alive
Leading Mountain Vista 4-3 in the sixth inning at All-City Field on Monday, the Rocky Mountain Lobos conceivably were closing in becoming the only remaining undefeated team in the Class 5A state high school baseball tournament. Or the other way to look at it was that Mountain Vista had one more chance to get the winning runs or force the game into extra innings. Then it started raining.
Then it started raining harder. Then it was a monsoon.
At that point, the Lobos started to go through the motions to get ready for the attempt to get three more outs and secure the victory. Problem was, the pitching mound quickly had become a quagmire and water was pooling on the infield. Rocky Mountain pitcher Kalen Hammer’s shoes were caked with mud, and his first attempt at a warm-up pitch made it look as if Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn had come out of the bullpen.
At that point, at 6 p.m. straight up, the umpires declared the game in a rain delay, and within 10 minutes, coaches Ron Quintana of Mountain Vista and Scott Bullock of Rocky Mountain met with tournament officials and with the umpires in the press box. They agreed the field already was unplayable and the game couldn’t be resumed, regardless of how long they waited.
All signed off on the decision to resume the suspended game at 10 a.m. Tuesday at Metro State, where the Roadrunners’ field is entirely artificial turf, minus even cutouts.
Regardless of the outcome of the game, both Rocky Mountain and Mountain Vista will be among the final four teams when the double-elimination tournament resumes Friday at All-City. The Lobos or Golden Eagles will be unbeaten in the double-elimination tournament and would have to lose twice on Friday and Saturday to not win the championship. The Rocky Mountain-Mountain Vista loser will join Cherry Creek and Broomfield, which both won Monday to stay alive, as once-beaten teams among the final four.
“It was a heck of a ballgame, and it was unfortunate that the weather had to roll in and we couldn’t get it done,” said Bullock. “But that’s the way baseball goes sometimes, and we’ll have to be resilient and come back tomorrow morning and find a way to win a baseball game.”
Even with his team three outs away from a win, Bullock approached the mound and made it clear he didn’t think the game should go on.
“I wanted to (play on). I really did,” Bullock said. “But I just looked out there as Kalen was warming up. The clay was just caking on his cleats, and I didn’t feel like that was fair.”
Quintana cited “the Colorado weather, I guess. You really don’t want to play a big game that means a lot in this stuff. It’s not fun baseball. … We probably should have suspended it earlier, I would say.”
Pitch-count rules could come into play Tuesday, but Quintana wasn’t sweating that.
“We’re fine,” he said. “We have about three or four guys who haven’t pitched yet. Obviously, it’s the top of the seventh so we have to score at least one to keep going, anyway.”
The bizarre part was that the weather was ugly in a different way when the game started, with the wind blowing hard out to right field, and Mountain Vista got backto-back, opposite-field solo home runs from Cole Blatchford and Sam Ireland to take a 2-0 lead in the first. But the Lobos tied it with two in the second and scored twice more in the fifth, with catcher Jadon Uhrich’s double the key hit of the inning.
The Golden Eagles got to within one in the top of the sixth, but Hammer relieved starter Trey Wagner with two on and one out and got the final two outs to end the rally.
And now they’ll pick up at the seventh inning at Metro on Tuesday.
Earlier Monday, Cherry Creek remained alive by beating Legend 13-12 in eight innings at All-City Field. Tanner O’Tremba’s two-run homer in the sixth pulled the Bruins into a 10-10 tie, and then Cherry Creek added three runs in the eighth, with Jed Malashock breaking the tie with an RBI single and Brennen Dorighi driving in two more with a oneout single past a drawn-in infield. That game lasted nearly four hours, pushing back the Rocky Mountain-Mountain Vista game — and eventually, that mattered.
In the morning game at All-City, Legend eliminated Dakota Ridge 5-3.
At Metro State in the afternoon game, Broomfield beat Rock Canyon 5-2 to move on to the final four, and that came after Rock Canyon defeated Legacy 7-4.