Greyhounds live up to prediction
YAKIMA – After last season ended short of the state tournament, Pullman head baseball coach Lance Lincoln gathered his returning players and told them he thought they could win a state championship.
Initially, the team was skeptical.
“Most of us thought he was damn nuts,” senior shortstop Kyle Hinrichs said.
As it turns out, Lincoln was prophetic, with Pullman taking the State 2A championship with a 7-3 win over Lakewood at County Stadium.
Another of Lincoln’s hunches played out well when he started senior left-hander Ryan Druffel, who responded with a solid performance. Druffel went the distance, allowing nine hits but walking nobody.
“Coach told me last night, after (Justin) Cooper pitched,” said Druffel, who only threw 33 innings this season. “I had butterflies when I came out for the first inning, but they were gone after that and everything just fell into place. It was awesome.”
It seemed like nobody else had butterflies when Pullman (24-2) jumped out to a quick three-run lead in the bottom of the first off Lakewood (23-5) starter Alex Thomas.
Leadoff batter Justin Erwin tripled to dead center, followed by a hit by pitch and an RBI single by Hinrichs, who is headed to Washington State.
Cooper grounded out up the middle to score another run, and Hinrichs raced home on a wild pitch for a 3-0 lead.
“It was all momentum,” Erwin said of his leadoff triple, which just cleared the head of Lakewood’s UW-bound center fielder Jake Rife. “I kept thinking he was going to catch it, but I just kept running hard.”
Lakewood answered with one in the second and two in the third off Druffel to tie it, but Pullman came right back in the bottom half of the third.
Druffel led off with a double to right-center, catcher Mitch Riddle sacrificed him over and sophomore right fielder Marty Guettinger smoked an RBI single up the middle off Lakewood reliever Brandon Stauffer (6-1), who took the loss.
“The season was fairly simple for us,” Lincoln said. “We would get up on a lot of teams and take the lead and never look back. I’m proud of how we responded and got back in it, and then every inning kept building.”
Pullman added another run in the fourth on an RBI double by another sophomore, J.T. Levenseller.
In the fifth with one out, Erwin drove a 1-2 pitch from Stauffer just inside the foul pole in left field, 295 feet away, to give the Greyhounds a 6-3 lead. Later in the inning, after Hinrichs reached on a fielder’s choice and stole second, Cooper got the green light on 3-0 and laced an RBI single into center.
Pullman left 12 runners on base, but it didn’t stop them from duplicating the school’s second state baseball championship, the other coming in 2001.
Lakewood fell short in the state championship for the second consecutive year.
“I just liked the makeup of this group,” Lincoln said. “I like how they have done in other sports. They’re a talented group and a mentally tough group.”
Druffel (6-0) got comfortable from the fourth inning on, allowing four hits, but didn’t allow a runner to reach third base. Druffel kept the Cougars off-balance by spotting his fastball and dropping in slow curves for strikes.
Blaine 2, Chewelah 1: Kyle Dhanani stole third base and scored on a throwing error in the fifth to lift the Borderites (18-9-1) past the Cougars (19-8) in the game for third and fourth places at Yakima Valley College’s Parker Field. Robert Bleecker pitched a four-hitter, striking out eight, and Joey Paciorek had an RBI single in the third for Blaine. Michael McCanna pitched a five-hitter, striking out eight and walking six, and Cameron Stroyan had a first-inning RBI for the Cougars.