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Poland forces tiebreaker for district championship
By CHARLES GROVE
BOARDMAN
Things were beginning to look a little bleak for Poland’s junior league squad in their elimination game against Boardman, it just took five innings of spinning their tires a bit before the offense got hot.
Trailing 3-2 heading into the bottom of the sixth, Poland erupted for five runs, three of which game with two outs, to beat Boardman 7-4 and force a true District Two championship game today at Fields of Dreams to decide the title.
“We’ve had our bats cool down a little bit before,” Poland head coach John Shurilla said. “We’ve faced [Boardman] four times in the season and we’ve crushed them four times. We were hitting ground balls right to them giving them easy outs. Once we started hitting we were good to go.”
Poland led early in the first after Jake Smith led off with a single and after a steal and an airmailed pickoff attempt, he came home on a Thomas Fire RBI groundout.
That lead stood until the top of the third when Jason Roussos scored on a passed ball before Jimmy Goske doubled and advanced to third to bring in Joey Kordupel to make it 2-1 Boardman. Colin Rushen grounded out a batter later to bring home Goske and put Boardman in command 3-1.
Poland chipped away in the fourth, adding one when Stephen Carney came around to score on a Boardman error. Poland still threatened with a runner on second and only one out but back-to-back flyouts ended the chance.
Poland scored their tying run when Carney tripled to left to bring home Jake Bacon at the beginning of the inning. Carney would score a batter later on a sacrifice fly by Zachary Yaskulka.
With two outs, D.J. Skarote became a trendsetter by singling between the third baseman and the shortstop into left field. The next three hitters of Josh Blasko, Tyler Berry and Smith all singled to the same spot, all driving in one apiece and blowing the game open to make it 7-3 Poland.
“When they’re hitting the ball into that gap where you normally don’t have a player there’s not much you can do,” Boardman head coach Joe Kordupel said. “We moved over as much as we could without compromising ourselves somewhere else and I’ve got to give them all the credit in the world.”
Shurilla said he was especially pleased that his players weren’t going up to the plate with a home run in mind.
“I was loving the station-to-station hitting,” Shurilla said. “I’ll take that all day. The kids came through and hit well and kept it within themselves.”
Boardman came back with a mini rally in the top of the seventh when Rushen drove in Joey Kordupel to cut the deficit to three with one out, but Yaskulka came on in relief to get the final out, and force a deciding game.
Berry pitched six and two-thirds for Poland, allowing seven hits and one walk while striking out four. Shurilla said Berry’s performance will help today’s cause since he didn’t have to burn through much of his bullpen on Tuesday.
“[Berry] threw strikes,” Shurilla said. “He’s been calm all year. He was getting ground balls and we’ll take it. I still have quite a few pitchers we haven’t even touched yet.”
Shurilla said he preached a “win this one first” mentality to his team for this game. Boardman would’ve wrapped up the championship with a victory.
“Game by game — I preach it to the kids,” Shurilla said. “You can’t look forward. There’s no sense in trying to think for the next game. You can worry about the next game after you win this game.”
In the Boardman dugout, the bats were unusually quiet as far as Joe Kordupel was concerned.
“We just have to score more runs,” Kordupel said. “Giving up seven runs isn’t the end of the world for us but we normally score a lot more runs so we’ll have to do better [today].”
Today’s game starts at 6 p.m. at the Field of Dreams in Boardman.
The winner of today’s game will be crowned district champions and will move on to the state tournament.