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McLean/Great Falls 13-year-olds drop heartbreaker
Unsure whether he'd actually had an audience, McLean/Great Falls coach Jim Balog made his point anyway. Nobody, not even Balog himself, thought he'd be making a postgame speech from a dugout in Live Oak, Fla.
For the second straight day, Balog tried to cook a tasty meal with lousy ingredients. But instead of blasting his team for its second consecutive come-from-behind loss, he focused on the journey that culminated in Tuesday's 10-7 loss to Greenville (N.C.).
“I asked the team, 'Our first practice, did anyone expect to be in the Southeast Region championship?' And of course, nobody said anything,” Balog admitted. “I said, 'You guys should be proud just to make it here.'”
As it turns out, they were.
“One of our primary goals was to win [a state championship],” said Andrew Culp, whose team earned that state title with a 9-0 win over Williamsburg on July 22. “I think we went above and beyond that by getting here, and I think we worked really well together as a team.”
Carrying a 7-6 lead into the top of the seventh inning Tuesday, McLean/Great Falls (12-2) couldn't escape with its lead intact. Greenville, with two outs and runners on first and second, fed off of an RBI-single to tie the game. In the bottom half, McLean/Great Falls went down in order.
In the eighth, a base hit was succeeded by a pair of outs and a pair of walks, as a bases-loaded, three-run double saddled McLean/Great Falls with an awfully difficult comeback in the bottom half of the game. After another 1-2-3 inning, the North Carolina natives had punched their ticket to the Babe Ruth League's World Series in Jamestown, N.Y.
“We had our opportunities, we could've won the game,” Culp said, “but they also had their opportunities. They just executed a lot better than we did.”
Tuesday's loss capped a back-and-forth, three-game series with Greenville. In the third game of the tournament, McLean/Great Falls rallied for a one-run win – something that Greenville would respond to on Monday in the first half of a double-elimination championship game.
In the final, Matt Moser, Thomas Dungan and Drew Balog had two hits apiece, while Colin Cantwell added a double.
“[Greenville] is kind of like us,” said Culp, who hit two home runs and had seven RBIs during Monday's 14-13 loss. “They just never gave up the whole time.”
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