HarbourCats’ bats go silent at wrong time
Kevin Collard of the Victoria HarbourCats, heading into Game 2 of the West Coast League final, said there is no feeling quite like “dog-piling on the other’s team’s home field” after winning a championship in baseball.
Collard and his HarbourCats teammates will have to wait until tonight to experience that, if it happens at all.
The Corvallis Knights took the best-of-three WCL final to a deciding third game tonight with a 6-0 victory in the second game Monday night in Corvallis, Oregon.
The game was a classically tight playoff encounter before the South Division-champion Knights broke open the scoreless game with six runs in the bottom of the eighth inning.
North Division-champion Victoria won Game 1 in a walk-off by rallying for two runs in the bottom of the ninth inning Saturday at Royal Athletic Park.
The Knights pitching was superb in Game 2, holding the best-hitting team in the league (.293 team average) to just two hits by Shane McGuire and Andrew Shaps.
Knights starter Dakota Donovan was throwing on a mound he knows well. The six-foot-six hurler plays for the Oregon State Beavers of the NCAA Pac-12, who share Goss Stadium with the Knights, in Corvallis. The righty spun a one-hitter over 6 1/3 innings before 1,655 fans.
Kolby Somers, a 2017 Seattle Mariners draft pick from up the road in the Pac-12 with the University of Oregon Ducks in Eugene, also allowed only one hit in 2 2/3 innings of clean up.
“They [Donovan and Somers] hit their spots over the plate. And any time we made good contact, Corvallis made nice defensive plays,” said Victoria GM Brad Norris-Jones.
“The ball was hit hard but just did not fall for us tonight. But all season we’ve hit the ball well and found the holes, and we have full confidence we will again in Game 3.”
About Corvallis’ decisive eighth-inning outburst, NorrisJones said: “It was a classic game, scoreless through seven, but they hit the holes in that eighth inning, and before you know it, the game is out of control.”
Garrison Ritter and Taylor Prokopis held Corvallis scoreless through seven before Prokopis was touched for four runs, and Lambrick Park Secondary thrower Mike Musselwhite for two, in the disastrous eighth.
Tasked with the start tonight for Victoria will be Blake Hannah (3-2) out of UC-Davis.
The HarbourCats are providing a free webcast of tonight’s deciding game that can be accessed through the HarbourCats’ website.
The Knights are playing in their ninth league final in 11 years and are after their fifth WCL title. The HarbourCats, in their fifth season, are playing in their first league final.