By GANNON HANEVOLD
Moapa Valley Progress
After a long and prosperous season for the Moapa Valley baseball team, the season came to a grand conclusion last week. And for the first time since 2012, and only the second time since 2001, the season had led the Pirates to the state championship tournament.
Going into the tournament, the Moapa team held the second seed in the south, after falling to Boulder City in the regional championship. From the northern region, the top seed was held by the Spring Creek Spartans, with the second seed belonging to the Elko Indians.
As fate would have it, the Pirates took on the Spartans in the first game of the state tournament.
The Pirates started strong in the game. In the first inning, Anthony Cornwall of the Pirates was walked. Cleanup hitter Daxton Longman delivered on a single that brought Cornwall to third.
The Pirates then ran a play fans have grown to know. The first-and-third play was run according to plan, as Longman headed to second and Cornwall dashed home for the first run of the game. Longman would be thrown out at second base but the Pirates had opened up a lead in their first state game.
Later on in the fourth inning, with the Spartans up to bat, they put runners on first and second base after a walk and a hit early in the inning. With one out, a ground ball came to Drake Staheli at short stop. Staheli stepped on the bag at second and made the throw in time for the well-orchestrated double play to end the inning.
In the following inning, Staheli came to bat with Hunter Wininski on base at second. Staheli drove a pitch into right field for an RBI double, giving the Pirates a 2-0 lead.
A sacrifice fly in the bottom of the same inning brought a Spartan runner home to cut the deficit back to one.
But the play that ended up shaping the game came in the sixth. Matt Shanks of Spring Creek got on base to lead off the inning. In the next at-bat, Shanks attempted to steal second and an overthrow brought him to third. Another overthrow that rolled over the third base coach’s foot and into the Spartans dugout awarded Shanks with a free walk in for the tying run.
In the seventh, the Spartans had sacrificed a runner to third to get in position for the go-ahead run. Sure enough, Spring Creek hit what would be a walk off RBI single into center field for the winning score. The Spartans would win the first round by a final score of 3-2.
Pirates Head Coach Ed McCann said the teams total amount of errors were a major factor in the loss. “We gift wrapped it for them,” McCann said. “That happens anytime you have five errors in one game. If we take away two of those errors, we win the game.”
“The game took the wind out of our sails,” McCann added. “I thought we outplayed them in most aspects of the game, but some of the crucial errors just killed us.”
A day later, the Pirates traveled to Las Vegas again for their second game of the tournament. This time, they were up against the Elko Indians.
Once more, the Pirates jumped out to a 2-0 lead. This time it was by the third inning, when Cornwall hit the ball into left field for an RBI single that brought home lead-off hitter Chase Guesman.
The Indians fought in the fourth inning to tie the game up, but in the bottom of the 4th, the Pirates caught fire. With Chase Hadley and Tyler Peterson in scoring position, Colby Longman hit a clutch two-RBI double over the head of the center fielder to give Moapa Valley the advantage once more.
Later in the inning, with Drake Staheli on first and Chase Guesman on second, Pirates catcher Anthony Cornwall stepped up to the plate and delivered a powerful hit over the left field fence for a three-run home run to extend the Pirates lead to 8-2.
“You could just see the air being let out from under Elko’s sails,” McCann said.
Moapa would hold on despite a late comeback attempt by Elko for an 8-4 win. Thus, the Pirates kept their heart beating for at least a few more hours.
“I think our guys came out and weren’t ready to be done with the season,” McCann said. “Hitting is contagious. Once we got going, Elko just kind of folded.”
Later that night, Pirate fans gathered again to see Moapa get another shot at the Spring Creek Spartans. The stands were packed, and eventually it was standing room only.
In the top of the first, Guesman was walked, and Staheli utilized the sacrifice bunt to get Guesman to second.
Then, up came Anthony Cornwall, fresh off his three-run homer earlier that afternoon. Incredibly, Cornwall blasted the ball deep over the same spot on the left field fence to bring in the first two runs of the day.
“After our two-spot in the first, I thought, ‘It’s on. Our guys are dialed in!’” McCann said.
Then, in the bottom of the first, everything fell apart for the Pirates. A combination of errors, hits, and walks, added up for an unheard of thirteen run first inning that went on for nearly 45 minutes. The Spartans led the Pirates 13-2 going into the second inning.
But the Pirate team refused to let a big lead stop them from trying to come back. All of a sudden, the hits were piling up in the fifth inning to cut the deficit to 15-7. With the bases loaded, Cornwall stepped up to the plate again. But considering he was already batting 1.000 through three at-bats, it was tough to ask for much more out of the Pirates star hitter. A strikeout took the Pirates to the sixth inning.
Two runs in the sixth led to the end of the game and the Pirates season came to a close.
“We just ran out of innings,” McCann said. “But our guys fought to the very end and there was no quit in them.”
McCann went on to describe the extraordinary support of Moapa Valley as a whole.
“You can’t say enough about our fan base,” he said. “Moapa Valley High School travels better than a lot of the high schools in the state of Nevada. It is in their DNA. They’ve done it all year and they weren’t going to stop.”
