ONONDAGA COUNTY – Only one thing – three victories in a span of five days – would allow the West Genesee baseball team to escape 44 years of waiting for a Section III championship.
The Wildcats got two of those wins, and were in prime position in Saturday’s title game to banish all the ghosts – only to have them resurface at just the wrong moment of a 13-7 defeat to top seed Baldwinsville.
This was, of course, the same Bees side that, in the 2018 sectional final, claimed a 1-0, extra-inning thriller to deny WG the sectional title. Here, B’ville would take a very different approach to giving the Wildcats ultimate heartbreak.
With two out in the top of the third inning, WG trailed 1-0 when Nick Jessen lifted a fly ball to right field that looked like it would end the inning – but it got dropped.
What followed was a cascade of Bees mistakes, four errors that led to six runs, with Ryan Klementowski clearing the bases thanks to a three-run double and Aidan Leaf adding an RBI double.
Staked to this 6-1 lead, Jessen, pitching on three days’ rest, was tagged in the bottom of the third when Aiden Milburn sent a drive deep over the left-field fence, ruled a home run when umpires said it stayed inside the pole.
Though WG scored a run in the top of the fourth to make it 7-3, it could not keep B’ville from taking advantage of the Wildcats’ own mistakes in what proved to be a decisive bottom of the fourth.
With the bases loaded, Kai Gerard’s two-run single made it 7-5. Two batters later, with Eric Korzniewski replacing Jessen on the mound, Dean Welch’s grounder allowed another run to score.
Milburn then followed with a two-run, go-ahead double, and the Bees added one more run on a wild pitch, exiting that inning with a 9-7 lead from which WG never recovered.
Four more runs in the sixth settled matters as the Wildcats were unable to get a run off Luke Arvantides, who pitched three scoreless innings of relief to close it out
Perhaps peeved at getting a no. 2 seed and having to go through an extra round, WG took it out on no. 7 seed Syracuse in the first inning of last Tuesday’s quarterfinal by batting around and scoring nine runs.
From there, the Wildcats cruised to an 11-1 victory, having Jessen go just three innings before Dan Davis and Wyatt Braun handled the rest in relief. Luis Suarez hit a home run as he and Klementowski both earned three RBIs, with Leaf driving in a pair of runs and Jake DePalma scoring three times.
Two days later, it was WG against no. 3 seed Cicero-North Syracuse, a team it had beaten twice the week before, in what proved to be a tense semifinal that the Wildcats would pull out 2-1 largely due to Klementowski’s clutch pitching.
In each of the first two innings, the Northstars had two runners on base with one out, but Klementowski worked out of it, coaxing a 1-6-3 double play in the first and getting a pair of strikeouts in the second.
So it was still 0-0 when, in the bottom of the third, WG loaded the bases and Dan Davis doubled home a pair of runs – all that the Wildcats needed, as it turned out.
Though C-NS left-hander Jacob Crystal contained the Wildcats the rest of the way, Klementowski didn’t allow anything more than a fourth-inning run resulting from two hits and a throwing error.
Striking out eight, Klementowski endured one more scare when, with two out in the top of the seventh, Corey Cartier singled and Bryce Zicaro walked. But Logan Karowski flew out to left to end it, the Northstars having stranded nine runners in the course of the afternoon.
While the sectional final loss to B’ville hurt, WG only graduates three seniors and will have most of its lineup back in 2022, intent again on ending its long sectional championship drought.
