13U Breaking News - #7 RBI Redwings Thump #6 MSA Black 10-2 to win 13U Michigan Major Elite NIT

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13U Breaking News - #7 RBI Redwings Thump #6 MSA Black 10-2 to win 13U Michigan Major Elite NIT

#7 RBI Redwings Thump #6 MSA Black 10-2 to win 13U Michigan Major Elite NIT

By Rich Kincaide

Sunday, June 15, 2008 (Ypsilanti, MI) – His team had beaten upstart Lapeer only minutes earlier 7-1 to advance to the championship game of the Michigan Major Elite NIT, but MSA Black coach Rick Goff looked anything but happy. “I’ve got a problem,” he explained. “I have no pitchers left.”

That kind of thing can happen when, as was the case in this event, you need 8 wins (including four on Sunday) to win the tournament and, by rule, no pitcher is allowed to work more than 11 total innings in the tournament.

So, even though he could have gotten a few innings from his regular pitchers, some of whom had not reached the 11-inning limit but who had pitched in one or more of the 3 earlier games MSA Black had played on Tournament Sunday, Goff instead used four position players on the mound in the title game. That approach, especially when the opponent is a high-quality team like the RBI Redwings, ranked #7 in the nation by Travel Ball Select, can yield a disappointing result. Such was the case in this case as RBI pounded (TBS #6) MSA Black 10-2 to win the Michigan Major Elite NIT.

It was quite a day of baseball.

The teams ranked nationally by Travel Ball Select (RBI, MSA and #15 Coral Springs) were each undefeated in pool play and locked up the top 3 seeds for the one-day, 16-team tournament.

MSA Black got a scare right out of the gate. In a rematch against an impressive Lake Shore Graysox team which they had barely beaten in a 1-run game the day before, MSA Black fell behind 5-1 and it looked as though the Graysox would pull the upset of the tournament. Black came back, though. Chipping away, MSA finally tied the game 6-6 in the 6th and won it, 7-6, on a walk-off Josh Knorr homer in the 7th. MSA then had a quite a tussle with an Indiana Prospects team that had been ranked in the Top 25 by TBS as recently as two weeks ago. MSA clung to a 1-0 lead before the Prospects tied the score in the top of the 7th. Indiana ran themselves out of a potential lead however when a double to right resulted not in the go-ahead run, but rather in a 9-4-2-5-6 inning-ending double play as not one, but two Prospects base runners were caught in rundowns. Ryan Goff’s RBI single in the bottom of the 7th gave MSA another one-run win, 2-1.

RBI’s path to the championship game was much less exciting (8-0 wins Mercy Rule wins over South Oakland and the Chicago White Sox Elite) until they got to the final inning of their semifinal against the Coral Springs (FL) Diamonds. In the top of the inning, RBI’s Dakota Forsyth hit a solo homer to give the Redwings a 3-0 lead. Inasmuch as the Redwings had not permitted a single run all day to that point, nobody really thought too much about it. But in the bottom of the 7th, the first two Diamonds reached and were driven home on a double by Chucky Lopez. Coral Springs proceeded to load the bases with one out before RBI relief pitcher Logan Corrigan struck one man out on a 3-2 pitch before inducing a game-ending infield pop-up to give RBI a much-too-close-for-comfort 3-2 win.

In the title game, RBI jumped into an early 2-0 lead before MSA Black’s Jeremy Moss tripled in a run in the bottom of the 3rd inning. Moments later, Moss was called out when, attempting to score on a wild pitch, he jumped over the sprawled RBI catcher who was trying to tag him and reached back to touch home plate when he came tumbling back to earth. While it appeared Moss had not been tagged, the home plate umpire called him out citing a USSSA rule which took effect this season which makes leaping over an opponent to avoid a tag illegal. In the top of the 4th, RBI’s Jason Hagar homered to make it a 3-1 game before play was suspended due to lightening in the area. When the game resumed an hour later, RBI added three more runs to take a 6-1 lead after three and a half innings. They added four more in the 6th to make it 10-1 en route to their 10-2 title game victory.

There was one other team of note in this event. The Lapeer Outlaws, an AAA team, went undefeated in pool play to earn the #4 seed in the tournament. Lapeer won their first two tournament games, 6-2 over Capitol City and 6-1 over the Indiana Bandits to run their record to 6-0 and make it all the way to the final four in the tournament. In the quarterfinal, it took the slants of MSA Black ace Josh Knorr to subdue them and end their remarkable run in what turned out to be a remarkable tournament, the 2008 Michigan Major 13U Elite NIT.

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