Photo | Vasha Hunt
Things couldn’t have gone much better for the Bayshore Christian baseball team last Wednesday in the AHSAA Class 1A state baseball championship series, especially following a tough Tuesday outing.
Dropping a 6-3 decision in the first game of the best-of-three title series to Donoho of Anniston the first night of play at Paterson Field in Montgomery, the Eagles totally dominated Donoho in a pair of five-inning, run-rule victories — 11-0 in Game 2 and 18-0 in Game 3 — to take the crown at Montgomery’s Riverwalk Stadium.
“As a coach, you try to find that perfect game and you practice for that perfect game, knowing that you can’t achieve it,” Bayshore head coach Jeff Hauge said. “But you try to do it. And we were so close. The way our pitchers threw and the way our hitters hit, and our defense didn’t make an error — it was as clean and as close to perfection as you could possibly get on this side of heaven.”
Hauge’s coaching philosophy for the final two games was simple: “Just let ’em go.”
“They were taking care of everything themselves,” he said. “John Malone was pumping strikes, our hitters were having incredible at-bats with great two-strike hitting on the day, and we let them put the ball in play and allowed our defense to make plays. We were in the zone; we were in the zone.”
Malone, who not only picked up the pitching victory in Game 2 but also started Game 3, going the first three innings, was almost perfect on the mound. He hit the first batter he faced in Game 2, but then proceeded to draw outs from the next 15 batters in a row, throwing a no-hitter.
“The first day, we were just real flat,” Malone explained. “Myself and everyone, we were just real flat and kind of out of it. I knew after that game, I 100 percent knew we are better than this team. We should beat them.
“I told the team before the [first game on Wednesday], ‘Guys, we should 10-run [rule] this team twice.’ I went out there and pitched that game and we won 11-0 and got the win, and then I said, ‘Guys, we should not be content with that; we should 10-run [rule] them again.’ It was everything I thought we should have done.”
Tuesday’s first game was brushed aside as a result of fatigue and other factors by the players.
“The first night I think we were all a little exhausted, having to finish [final] exams that day and then drive over and only have one day of practice,” Luke Werneth said. “It threw the team off balance. To see us come back and play the way we had been playing all year [the second day], it was nice to see that again. That was our team right there.”
Bayshore collected the state title in its first year of playoff eligibility after moving to AHSAA competition.
“The whole year of playing such a difficult schedule prepared us for the moment that we had [Wednesday] night,” Hauge said. “We saw some of the best pitching that the state of Alabama has [during the regular season] right here in Mobile and Baldwin counties. Our guys had some success against them and some nights without success. But what it did was prepare us for the championship run.
“It’s something that we’ve been building for several years around here. I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to make a run this year because of the youth on our team, but I had a good feeling we were going to make a deep run into the playoffs because we did a lot of the basic things in baseball well — we hit well, we throw well, we catch it well. Those are the things I felt could help us out when we got in a playoff run.”
Winning the state championship is a memory that is going to last a lifetime, Werneth and Malone said.
“I think this is only the beginning,” Malone said. “I told the guys our goal should be to be in 2A next year. I would hope we are. We had one senior this year and we’ve only got one junior, so this should only be the beginning. We have every reason to believe we could repeat and even three-peat. I really think the sky’s the limit with this team.
“I’ve been going to this school since I was 6 years old and we didn’t even have any sports in the school. It’s really great to see how everything has come on … I remember when they said, ‘Guys, we’re getting baseball,’ which was great, to playing in a conference that wasn’t really that good and then to start playing teams like Fairhope and Robertsdale. It was great to be able to play those types of teams.
“It’s really surreal. I never thought we’d be in this spot in our first year [of eligibility], especially after losing five seniors [from the previous year].”
Werneth added, “It meant a lot to me, being a part of this program for so long. I think the guys worked hard for it all year … We put everything we have into this, and I’m real proud of the guys for coming as far as we did this year.
“I think it’s a good way to get our name out there. It was a good accomplishment for the school. We get our name out there a little bit; last year they cut us off [ending the season because of COVID-19] as we were starting to get things going a little bit. We lost a lot of seniors [from last year’s team] and I think that was a lot of motivation for us to get better. The community and everybody really backed us up. I really enjoyed it.
“The celebration was great. The night after the first game we had a little team meeting: ‘Do you want to come back with a Red state or a Blue state?’ [Blue Map trophies represent state champions; Red Map trophies represent state runners-up.] We all thought about it and changed our mindset and got focused and came out and played that way. It was a really fun bus ride home. We all enjoyed it.”
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