Mosquito Indians punching above their weight
The Swift Current AA Indians continued to punch above their weight when they won the Baseball Regina Mosquito AAA League with three consecutive wins in Regina.
Swift Current finished the regular season with a 12-5 record and entered the playoff tournament seeded third out of seven teams.
Swift Current opened the weekend with an 11-1 win over the Pilot Butte Broncos.
They edged Melville 54 in the semi-finals. “We were leading through the whole game, but they threw a real good pitcher at us,” said coach Brad Bell.
The Indians led 4-2 and gained a 5-2 lead before Melville battled back to make it 5-4.
“We had a real good pitching performance from Mac Gross. He threw about 5 1/3 innings for us and threw really well. It was a good tight ball game,” explained Bell.
The Indians topped the rival Weyburn Beavers 7-6 in the championship game to win the league title.
The Indians jumped out to a 5-0 lead in the first inning. “We had lots of good energy with the big first inning,” noted Bell.
“They kind of chipped away at it throughout the course of the game. They tied it up 5-5 going into the fifth and we were a little bit down. With two out we got a guy on and a first-year player for us, Kelsey Rokochy, hit a tworun home run over the fence, which was our first
The Swift Current AA Indians won three straight games over the weekend to win the Baseball Regina AAA Mosquito League. of the year.”
Weyburn replied with one run in the sixth inning but Swift Current held them with a couple guys on base.
“We were really pleased, it was a really good weekend for us. That is a big accomplishment for us to win that AAA league out of Regina,” said Bell.
Bell believed that last year was the first time a Swift Current Mosquito team had entered the AAA league in Regina when they got beat out in the semi-final.
“We played really good,” said Bell of the weekend. “We are really stressing the team concept. We have lots of different guys chipping in and our pitching was good as always, we really pitched well. We have been working a lot on our hitting. We scored a lot more runs and we were makings things happen and the guys were running the bases really well.”
Bell said the win over Weyburn will only heighten the rivalry between the two teams.
“Yeah we really do. We have battled with Weyburn all year. They have had the better of us so far. I think that is the second time where we have beat them. A couple times we had’em in tournament finals and they came back and beat us in the last innings. So this was huge boost for us, we needed to beat them one time. We have been telling our kids that we can play with them and it was exciting. The kids were really excited.”
The Mosquito Indians will take part in AA Provincials in Martensville on July 1921. They will face opposition from Estevan, Weyburn, Martensville, Lloydminster, Nipawin, and Prince Albert at the seven-team tournament. Swift Current are the twotime defending AA Provincial champions after defeating Weyburn in the gold medal game last season.
“Well as long as we keep pitching well, which I think we will, we feel really good about our pitching,” said Bell of the keys to the weekend. “We have worked a pile on our defense and we definitely need to be able to score some runs is going to be the key. We have worked on that a lot and the kids are trying to take a little more of an aggressive approach up there. We saw two or three guys really chip in this weekend that we needed to chip in and it really made a huge difference.”
Bell feels that a meeting with an old rival looms on the horizon as well.
“Hopefully we can keep rolling. I think we will see Weyburn somewhere along the way again, so that will be the game we have to win again.”