Recordpub.com - Ravenna Braves lose heartbreaker in F League final

By Eric Clutter

Record-Courier correspondent

ALLIANCE — The Ravenna D.S. Concrete Braves had plenty of chances to win Sunday’s F League Ohio Hot Stove state championship game in Alliance.

The Braves collected 13 hits off Firestone Park pitching, but had only three runs to show for their efforts.

The Sox, meanwhile, made the most of their six hits and seven walks off three Ravenna pitchers and earned the title plaque with a dramatic 4-3 victory at Butler Rodman Park.

Nathan Rogers’ first-pitch single to right field with the bases loaded and one out in the bottom of the seventh inning broke a 3-all deadlock and sent the Braves, who were trying to win the club’s second state title in the last five years, home with a runner-up plaque and a 26-3 final record.

“They got the clutch hits when they needed them and we didn’t; it is as simple as that,” said Ravenna manager Lonnie Stacy, whose team had outscored its opponents in the postseason 80-10 entering Sunday’s game. “That is why you play the game. Baseball is like that. Some days you can’t buy a run and you score six and win 6-0 (Saturday’s semifinal score). Then the next day you are hitting the ball all over the park and can’t score runs. That’s just the way it goes.”

This marked the sixth season Stacy has coached the Braves. In 2005 as an H League edition, Ravenna won a state title. Sunday, with seven of those kids on his roster, another title was there for the taking.

“How can you be upset with 26-3?” reflected the manager. “You hate to go all this way and not carry home the big prize, but I can’t be upset with the boys. I’ve coached them for six years and they are fun to coach. They have been a joy to coach and I’m going to miss them.”

Ravenna tied the game in the top of the seventh and was poised to take the lead with the go-ahead run at third and only one away.

But Firestone Park’s Devin Elekes, who entered in relief of starter Jacob Bumgarner after the F League MVP surrendered a game-tying single to Kyle Spellman with one gone, slammed the door by inducing a groundout to himself for the frame’s second out and one to his second baseman for the third out.

Ravenna pitcher Dillon Gillespie, who took the mound in the fifth, walked the first two batters of the seventh and was replaced by Spellman.

After a wild pitch moved the runners to second and third, Spellman fanned Adam Gray for the first out of the inning. Vincent Woicehovich, who had led off the sixth with a long double that eventually led to a run that put Firestone Park ahead 3-2, was then intentionally walked to fill the bases.

Rogers then wasted little time in becoming a hero, lifting the first pitch he saw into medium right field.

Walks were instrumental in Firestone Park’s two-run second inning. Jacob Mazak and Andrew Agner both received one-out free passes, and both scored on Bumgarner’s two-out single to right.

Ravenna, which had defeated the Sox 1-0 in a Memorial Day tournament game earlier in the season, strung four hits together in the fourth and trimmed the lead in half when Gillespie beat out a hit to the shortstop to bring in a run.

An inning later, a one-out balk on Bumgarner proved costly when Ravenna’s Kyle Kornbau, who started on the mound, laced a two-out single through the left side of the infield that leveled the contest at 2-2.

Tate Bennett and Brandon Gros each contributed three hits to the Ravenna cause. Spellman and Kornbau added two hits and one RBI apiece.