A single week of diamond drama was supposed to determine whether the West Genesee baseball team ended 42 long years of waiting for another Section III title.
Instead, the no. 2 seed Wildcats never made it out of the quarterfinal round, ousted 3-1 in 10 innings by no. 7 seed Fayetteville-Manlius Tuesday night at Wells College.
Just about every possible break went against WG in the days and hours leading up to the game with F-M, even after it had clinched the SCAC Metro division regular-season title with an 8-4 record.
On May 24, the Wildcats beat Utica Proctor 6-3 to close its regular season at 14-5 overall, breaking out of an early 1-1 tie with a run in the fourth inning and four runs in the fifth.
Tyler Kensey went four-for-four with a double and RBI, while Joe Comins, Jake DePalma, Gavin Leahy, Dan Davis and Brad May also drove in runs, Comins and Chris Bonacci each scoring twice. Ryan Paige pitched five innings, limiting Proctor to three hits and striking out seven before Sam Gallager and Jack Gordon closed it out in relief.
Now WG had to watch and see if it would get the top seed, which would take place if Baldwinsville lost either of its last two games, to F-M and Cicero-North Syracuse.
But the Bees won them both and, by seizing the top seed in a seven-team sectional AA bracket, earned a bye straight into the semifinals, leaving the Wildcats to have to deal with an F-M side that knew them well from a three-game series two weeks earlier.
It wouldn’t happen in Camillus, either. Rains that fell early on Tuesday forced the game to get moved to the new all-weather field at Wells College, stripping the Wildcats of home-field advantage, yet another bad break.
WG had won two of those three games in the series with F-M, but here it had to face Hornets ace Tom Coleman, who for six innings quieted the Wildcats’ bats, accumulating seven strikeouts.
Itai Spinoza’s RBI single in the top of the third put the Hornets in front 1-0. Despite allowing five hits and five walks, Paige kept F-M off the board until Gallager relieved him in the seventh.
Three outs from having its season end, WG struck in the bottom of the seventh, Kensey bringing home Comins with the tying run, sending it to extra innings, where the Wildcats had found frequent success during the season.
The eighth and ninth innings went without a run, Gallager and F-M counterpart John Egnaczyk keeping it 1-1. Then, in the top of the 10th, F-M loaded the bases, and Max Parker coaxed a walk, followed by a Sean O’Connor sacrifice fly.
With that two-run cushion, Egnaczyk got the final three outs, and for the second year in a row WG saw its season conclude with an extra-inning defeat, Baldwinsville having done the same thing to them in the 2018 sectional final.
And F-M didn’t stop here, also knocking off no. 3 seed Cicero-North Syracuse 5-0 in Thursday’s semifinal at Auburn’s Falcon Park to set up a shot at dethroning B’ville in the sectional final.
