Sweet Home’s baseball season ended with two losses to Cascade.
The Cougars beat the Huskies in Sweet Home 9-2 on Wednesday. The next day, the Huskies took to the road and played at Cascade, where the Cougars won 19-3.
Sweet Home finished the season 5-17 and 3-12 in the 4A-3 Oregon West Conference, a record that put the Huskies at last place in the tough OWC.
In the first game, Cascade (7-14, 5-10) scored three runs in the first inning, two in the second, and four in the sixth. Sweet Home’s only two runs came in the bottom of the sixth, when an Alex Kisselburgh single scored Casey Valloni and Kaden Zajic.
Cascade outhit Sweet Home 11-3, and committed one error to Sweet Home’s two.
Zajic started on the mound for the Huskies. He pitched two innings and allowed five earned runs on six hits, including two home runs, while striking out one.
“He’s had a couple of really awesome games for us, but they were putting them in play hard,” Head Coach John Best said.
Lewis Conn came in for relief, and pitched five innings. He allowed three earned runs on five hits, while striking out three and walking two. Best said Conn “gave us a really good effort.”
Kisselburgh had a big day at the plate, getting all three of the Huskies hits. The effort included two doubles and two RBIs.
“We didn’t come out ready to go in the first two innings, so we were just trying to play from behind the whole game,” Best said. “And that made it tough. I felt like they had a guy on the mound that we could have hit a little bit, but he mixed up his pitches pretty well.”
The next game, the Huskies threw four different pitchers at the Cougars, with little success in deadening Cascade’s bats. The Cougars scored four runs in the first inning, three in the second, and 12 in the third on the way to their 19-3 victory.
Sweet Home’s three runs came in the top of the fifth inning, when Hunter Ashby hit a double to score Kisselburgh, Zajic, and one other player.
Cascade outhit Sweet Home 11-4, and committed no errors to Sweet Home’s three.
Jon “Huston” Holly started the game on the mound for the Huskies and pitched one inning, giving up three earned runs on three hits while walking one. Jacob Sieminski pitched one inning, giving up seven earned runs on four hits while striking out one and walking four.
Ashby pitched one frame, giving up no earned runs on three hits while striking out two and walking three. Josh Wilson was the final pitcher for the Huskies, also pitching one inning and giving up no earned runs on one hit. The Sweet Home staff struggled with command on the mound, giving up eight walks and hitting two batters for a total of 10 free bases allowed.
Ashby, Valloni, Sieminski, and Zajic each had a hit for the Huskies, with Ashby connecting for the three-RBI double.
“They came out ready to go,” Best said of Cascade. “They took it to us. We were kind of depleted with our main arms. Everything we threw they were hitting like crazy.”
Looking back on the season, Best said “Obviously the win and loss record wasn’t quite what we wanted, but we were playing fairly good until that last series.”
He said a 4-0 win against Cascade on May 9 at Oregon State University’s Goss Stadium was a highlight of the season, as well as the series against Newport, in which Best said he thought his team played “really well” (The Huskies upset the Cubs with a 7-6 walk-off win on May 4).
“We were starting to come alive a little bit as a team. I was really proud of the guys,” Best said. “They gave tremendous effort all season. Nobody gave up or gave in. Our practices were focused, and we were ready to get after whatever it was that we were trying to work on that day.”
“I really commend our players for working their tails off,” he continued. “It was kind of a tough year, but at the same time, we were competing until that last game, so I was really pleased about that.”
He noted that his team played a lot of tightly contested ball games. “I don’t like to play the ‘what if’ game, but we had an awful lot of games where it was a play or two or a hit or a strike away,” he said. “We had a lot of games that were really close and could have gone either way. Some of them went our way, but most of them went the other. But we were a competitive team in our league for sure.”
The graduating seniors on the team are Kisselburgh, Russell Holly, Tucker Weld, and Josh Wilson. “We had four seniors this year, and every single one of those guys played a huge role,” Best said. “We’re going to miss our seniors.”