Cartwright wins senior AA title

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This article was published 08/08/2022 (1350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Drew Haight’s home run in the first inning proved to be the difference as the Cartwright Twins won a 1-0 pitching duel over the host Rivers Comets on Sunday to capture the senior AA provincial championship.

“It’s good to finally win one with the Twins,” Haight said. “We feel like we’ve had a decent team for a lot of years and we’ve come to a bunch of tournaments and played well, but it just didn’t work out on Sunday. It finally worked out.”

The game, which was played in just 70 minutes, featured a pitching duel between the Comets’ Scott Beever and the Twins’ Anthony Friesen. The latter who was picked up by Cartwright from the Pilot Mound Pilots, also shut out the Boissevain Centennials in the semifinal, 2-0.

Haight marvelled at the pitching clinic put on by Friesen, who was nursing a sore arm all summer and didn’t spend much time on the mound.

“Obviously if you can get a guy who can throw that many innings, it’s helpful,” Haight said. “He’s won a bunch over the years and he did it again.

“He hasn’t thrown as much this year so we weren’t sure what we were going to get out of him but he wants to keep going and he’s a competitor. He wants to win and that’s what he did.

“Fourteen innings, no runs, he just kept throwing. What else can you say? The guy is a beast out there.”

The 33-year-old Friesen, who came to his first provincial event as a teenager and seems to get picked up by a team every year, figures he’s now won around eight titles. The crafty southpaw, who mixes up his speeds and delivery points, was able to induce a lot of ground balls and a stingy defence behind him did the rest.

“Muscle memory kicked in,” Friesen said. “Once you throw enough, it’s just repeating the motion. It definitely helps just doing it over and over.”

If revenge is indeed a dish best served cold, the Twins are apparently evil geniuses.

An almost identical game happened in the senior A final on Aug, 20, 2017 when Ryan Shaw of the Comets outduelled Taylor Bramwell of the Twins in a 2-0 Rivers victory that took 75 minutes to play. In that game, Mike McFadden was doubled home by Brad Roth in the bottom of the first inning, and the hosts added an insurance run in the sixth for the win.

Both pitchers gave up just five hits.

“It was the same thing,” Haight said. “Shaw threw for them and it was close. It’s weird how those things work out but it’s nice to have good games on Sunday.”

Besides 2017, Cartwright has made one other other appearance in a provincial final, when they fell 3-1 to the Elmwood Giants in Wawanesa on July 28, 2019 in the A event.

The final was also a rematch of Friday’s round-robin game, which Rivers won 5-4. Cartwright beat the Elmwood Giants and Deloraine Royals by identical 8-4 scores on Saturday to post a record of 2-1 and advance to the playoffs.

“We started out with a loss but we looked at that one as not playing very well,” Haight said. “We lost by one and then bounced back and had a real good day on Saturday and obviously a good day on Sunday. It would have been nice to see the bats go a little more but we’ll take it.”

It turns out they got the only hit they needed when Haight came to the plate in the bottom of the first.

With one out, Haight simply wanted to make contact with the ball.

“I just looked for a pitch to hit hard, obviously, like every at-bat,” Haight said. “He threw a first-pitch change(up) — he’s got a good change — and he missed so I was like ‘Well, he might come back with a fastball.’

“He did and it was in a good spot and I got to put a good swing on it and it worked out. It felt good.”

The ball rocketed off the bat high over the fence in right field and hit the metal siding on the new Rivers canteen with a thud.

“I felt good about that one,” Haight said. Ryan Shaw led Rivers with three of their five hits. The Comets had their best chance to score with two out in the third inning when Shaw was on third base and John Hutton was on first, but Friesen was able to induce a groundball and Haight made a nice throw from third base to first to extinguish the threat.

“The ground balls were coming in the last couple of innings so it was making me throw a little bit less,” Friesen said. “It definitely made my day go easier. They played good defence and we got them out.”

Friesen struck out three batters without issuing any walks: A dozen outs came from ground balls.

While it didn’t work out for him on the scoresheet, Beever said the pitching duel was a treat to participate in. He allowed just four hits and one walk while striking out three batters.

“A 1-0 ballgame is pretty fun to be part of,” Beever said. “It’s always close and every pitch matters.”

Along with the round-robin win over the Twins on Friday, the hosts topped the Deloraine Royals 14-2 on Saturday morning and finished first in Pool A despite a 15-0 setback to Elmwood on Saturday evening.

In the semifinals earlier Sunday, Rivers edged the Border Baseball League’s Winkler Whips 6-5 in an extra inning.

The loss in the final to the Twins prevented the Comets for achieving an incredible feat, which would be winning both the senior A and AA titles in the same summer. Rivers beat the Plumas Pirates in Wawanesa to win the A title on July 24.

“It’s definitely tougher to be on this side of it than the other side of it, but it’s growing pains and hopefully next year this just makes us stronger,” Beever said. “We’ll be back here again.”

Four teams didn’t make the playoffs, the RFNow Cardinals (Brandon’s Andrew Agencies Senior AA Baseball League, 1-2), Deloraine (Southwest, 1-2), Elmwood (Winnipeg, 1-2) and the Neepawa Cubs (Santa Clara, 0-3).

After a promising start with a 3-0 win over Neepawa on Friday afternoon, the Cardinals dropped a wild 18-16 loss to the Centennials on Saturday morning, and then fell 7-0 to the Whips in the afternoon to knock them out of contention. Deloraine suffered the same fate, losing both games on Saturday after opening with a win.

Prior to being shut out by Friesen on Sunday morning, Boissevain scored 38 runs as it won its three round-robin games, 16-6 over Elmwood, 18-16 over Brandon and 10-2 over Neepawa.

Off the field, the well-attended event worked out well, Beever said.

“It was tons of fun,” he said. “We get to bring a bunch of really good baseball players out from around the province and the townspeople came together and we put a lot of effort in from a lot of volunteers.

“I’m really happy that everyone showed really well. We had a lot of fun this weekend and that’s what it’s about.”

While that’s it for the Comets this season, the Twins still have baseball remaining.

Incredibly, Pilot Mound and Cartwright are tied 1-1 in the Border Baseball League’s best-of-three West Division final, with the series set to resume on Thursday. That will put Friesen back in the other dugout.

“Hopefully we don’t see him (on the mound),” Haight added with a laugh.

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