Union senior Skyler Frasier needed just about 10 minutes to come to grips with what happened to the Titans on Tuesday.
“We worked hard all year to get us in a situation with a two-game elimination,” he said. “We’ll come back tomorrow and have a good game tomorrow.”
Indeed, the Union baseball team did earn a two-to-win-one scenario in order to make it to the Class 4A state tournament. Good thing for them, too, because they booted their first opportunity.
Puyallup took advantage of two errors and scored six unearned runs in the first inning, then cruised to an 11-1, five-inning victory over the Titans in the opening round of the bi-district tournament at Propstra Stadium. The Vikings will play Saturday in two seeding games, but have assured themselves a trip to state.
Union, meanwhile, must win today against Auburn Riverside in Kent. First pitch is scheduled for 4 p.m.
“I don’t want to make excuses, but we haven’t had any game experience. We were off for more than a week,” Frasier said. “We didn’t come out ready to play like we needed to, and they were fired up and caught us off-guard.”
That was Puyallup’s strategy.
“That was our plan from the start,” said Puyallup’s James Harris, who drove in the first run of the game with a sacrifice fly and later blasted a two-run homer. “We wanted to score early, especially for us coming all the way here where we’re not comfortable.”
The Titans got a run back in the bottom of the first on Frasier’s single — the third consecutive hit followed by singles from Caleb Whalen and Clint Coulter — to give the Titans some hope.
But Harris followed with a two-run shot in the second inning to make it 8-1.
The Titans committed another error, leading to another unearned run in the fourth. Matt Becker’s two-run homer in the top of the fifth gave the Vikings an 10-run advantage, and the game was called when Union failed to cut the margin to single digits in the bottom of the frame.
“That was not our baseball team that we threw out there on the field,” Union coach Tom Lampkin said. “That was not our product.”
He added that if it had to happen in the postseason, at least it happened in a game that was not do-or-die.
“That’s the way we have to look at it. That’s not us,” Lampkin said. “Luckily, we have another shot to come back and try to redeem ourselves.”
