Well, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
But when Clear Lake High School varsity baseball coach Brian Figg was ejected from a practically meaningless non-league game at Tomales High School on May 2, little did he or anyone else know that the first in a series of dominoes had been knocked over.
The final one tumbled late Friday afternoon & right onto Figg”s head.
If you”ve scanned the sports pages of the Record-Bee today, you will notice that there is no story detailing Clear Lake High School”s involvement in the North Coast Section Class A baseball playoffs, which begin Wednesday. Going into Friday, Clear Lake had clinched a three-way share of the league title along with St. Vincent and Cloverdale, but more importantly, the Cardinals held the tiebreaker for an automatic berth in the playoffs.
Less than 24 hours later, the Cardinals had forfeited a league game to St. Helena, dropping them out of a first-place tie, which meant no automatic playoff berth. Less than 48 hours later, Clear Lake”s bid for an at-large berth in the Class A playoffs had been denied. Their season was done.
All because of that May 2 game in Tomales.
So what happened?
Figg was ejected from the Tomales game and North Coast Section rules, which are exceedingly clear, say that a coach who is ejected must sit out his next game. Figg didn”t do that. On May 3, he coached the Cardinals to a 10-1 win at St. Helena. On May 8, he sat out Clear Lake”s 12-4 NCL I interlock loss to Lower Lake.
Why the delay?
According to sources at the school, Figg claimed he wasn”t sure if he had been ejected. The umpire”s report from Tomales, detailing the ejection, didn”t arrive before the St. Helena game, so Figg rolled the dice and decided to coach against St. Helena. That”s what it amounts to.
The irony is that the Cardinals, with or without Figg, most likely would have beaten a struggling St. Helena team handily. But by coaching in that game, he took a terrible risk when you stop to consider what he had to gain versus what he had to lose.
What he lost was a league title in the worst way possible. And the seniors on Figg”s squad were the biggest losers of all. They won”t get another shot at the postseason. Those memorable home runs by Connor McCrea and Ryan Dixon to beat St. Vincent will surely be memorable in years to come, but the shine on them has just been permanently erased.
A bigger question is why it took so long for Clear Lake to forfeit the game? The Tomales contest was played on May 2, but the forfeiture didn”t come until May 18, a span of 16 days.
Figg never reported the results of the Tomales game to the newspaper. When asked about it following the St. Helena game the very next day, he commented on it briefly. Results of the Lower Lake-Clear Lake game played on May 8, a contest held in Lakeport, also were not reported by Clear Lake”s coaches, so they certainly didn”t want to advertise a bad situation that only was going to get a whole lot worse.
And boy, did it get worse. A letter mailed by someone with distinct knowledge of the inner workings of the Clear Lake baseball program began to circulate around the section, and you better believe St. Vincent and Cloverdale were listening.
Meetings involving Figg, Clear Lake athletic director Glenn Meyer and school administrators took place a short time later. Finally, on Friday, Clear Lake made its final decision and Figg announced to his players that the Cardinals were forfeiting the St. Helena win, their league title and everything else they had worked so hard for during the last three months.
Clear Lake still had an outside chance to gain the playoffs as an at-large team on Sunday in Walnut Creek during the at-large and seeding meeting, but the Cardinals” 12-8 overall record wasn”t good enough in the eye of the committee, which turned away four teams.
The irony here is that the Cardinals started reserves in both the Tomales and Lower Lake games, two contests Figg said were not important to his team”s playoff chances. Had Clear Lake started its regulars and won both, they might have qualified for the playoffs as 14-6 looks a lot better on the big board than 12-8.
That proved to be another bad gamble.
Where does Clear Lake go from here with its baseball program?
That”s a good question.
How do you get ejected from game and not know it?
That”s an even better one.
Who should be held accountable for this meltdown?
That”s the easiest one of all.
