COLUMBIA CRUSHES COLONIE IN AA SEMIFINAL
TROY, NY » From the first round to the championship round, don’t sleep on these No. 7 seed Columbia Blue Devils, they’ll pounce and make you pay. Facing the No. 3 seed Colonie Garnet Raiders, the Blue Devils took full advantage of every opportunity in a 14- 4 mercy rule semifinal victory.
“I think the story today was just our approach at the plate. We were able to work counts or get ourselves into hitter’s counts,” Blue Devils’ head coach Chris Dedrick said of his team’s strategy at the dish. “When we got our pitches, we were able to drive them and when we didn’t, we walked. That was a big part of our offense today.”
While the Garnet Raiders would take a 1- 0 lead on a sac fly to center in the first, it wouldn’t take long for the Blue Devils to respond in kind.
First baseman Danny Watson set the table in the second stanza with a double off Colonie starting pitcher Kyle Lambert. With one down and two on following a Kyle Fortin hit by pitch, Matt Wimmer squared the contest at one with a base knock to left. Giving Columbia their first lead of the game was Steve Blydenburgh with a two-run double to right, making it a 3-1 game. A walk to Justin Pangburn, followed by a wild pitch and a walk to Wimmer,
set up Matt LaHera’s tworun single to left, increasing Columbia’s advantage to 5-1. After Watson was hit by a pitch, Lambert’s day was done. With southpaw Spencer Wall on, Carmen Erno was able to help his own cause by drawing a free pass and an RBI in the process at 6-1.
“So we had a lot of respect for that team coming into this game. We knew they could put up runs in a hurry if they had to and we knew they had good pitching so we wanted to get on them as quick as possible and stay on them as much as possible and we continued to do that throughout the game,” said the senior second baseman Pangburn.
Indeed the Blue Devils jumped on and stayed on the Garnet Raiders early and often.
During the third, Columbia would do even more damage, thanks in part to Pangburn’s bat.
“I saw a 2- 0 fastball and I had a man on second and I didn’t want to leave him hanging, I turned on an inside pitch and it just went. I did not think it was going but it kept going,” the SUNY Brockport bound Pangburn said after topping his first tworun tater to left. The home run placed an exclamation point on the Blue Devils onslaught and increased their advantage to 8-1.
“He worked the count a little bit and he just got his pitch and stayed on top. We’d been working with him all week on staying on top of that high pitch,” coach Dedrick said of Pangburn’s home run. “Working on keeping the barrel on a level plane because he likes that pitch at the top of the strike zone and he got it and man the work paid off for him.”
From there, the Blue Devils kept churning out runs and the combination of Erno, Brandon Ostiguy, who left the contest with a leg injury and Ryan Nista, were able to keep the Garnet Raiders bats at bay.
“It feels amazing. For the last five years our coach has been telling us, we have a very strong senior class, telling us that this is our year and we’re getting it done so far,” Pangburn said of what it meant to reach the title game with his fellow seniors.
“You have a group that’s a little bit younger at Ballston Spa, led by Luke Gold, who’s one of the best players in our league, they’re a young squad and hungry, they got a great coach over there in Curtis Nobles you know, I love the guy,” coach Dedrick said of the Scotties and his mu- tual admiration for coach Nobles.
Given the mirroring styles of play and the paths they’ve taken to get to this point, one should anticipate a pair of squads which are ready and off and running in the Class AA sectional final on Tuesday night.