KELSEYVILLE >> It’s not over ’til it’s over.
No need to hunt up the perspectives of the late Yogi Berra to find attribution for that. Just ask the Kelseyville Knights baseball team, which on Saturday was a living example as it escaped with a 9-8 victory over St. Bernard’s of Eureka in a non-league varsity game at Lloyd Larson Field.
Essentially, what the Knights (4-2) had to do was win the same game twice. They all but had the game won up 7-0 going to the top of the seventh inning, but they trailed 8-7 going to the bottom half. Kelseyville senior Noah Lyndall almost single-handedly beat the Crusaders (2-3) by bashing the first pitch he saw from St. Bernard starter Garrison Finck over the left-field fence for Kelseyville’s first two runs in the bottom of the first, and he also was shutting them out from the mound on two hits, four walks and five strikeouts through six inning. But Lyndall the pitcher as opposed to Lyndall the hitter (2-for-3, double, homer 3 RBIs) couldn’t make it through the seventh.
Asked if he thought of relieving Lyndall before he had surrendered the first six of St. Bernard’s eight runs in the seventh, Kelseyville head coach Lou Poloni said, “I thought the way he dominated them in the first six innings that he’d work through it.”
Neither coach — Kelseyville’s Poloni or St. Bernard’s David Sharp — was expecting the Crusaders’ seventh-inning rally, during which the Crusaders sent 12 batters to the plate and saw four of them walk with the bases loaded to force in runs.
“I have no idea what happened,” Poloni said. “We were cruising along. Noah’s throwing the ball good, we’re playing good defense, we’re hitting and then the wheels fell off.
“That was a little landslide,” Poloni added. “We always talk about it. Baseball’s a game where there’s no clock. In basketball if you’re down by 25 with two minutes remaining you lose. In baseball you can be down by 10 and as long as you don’t make three outs you’re still gunning.
“Our big thing was to keep it in focus and find a way to win in the bottom of the seventh.”
Kelseyville’s two-run bottom of the seventh didn’t end with a big hit. Instead, the winning run was forced home from third base when Devin Dugger was hit by a pitch.
“We had one goal going into that seventh inning and that was to score one run,” Sharp said. “The guys went out to break up their shutout.”
Said Poloni, “They did a couple of things and we’re down 8-7. That’s baseball. We played six really good innings and I was proud of the way we responded in the seventh. It wasn’t pretty. But at the end of the day it’s a win.”
Kelseyville had 11 hits and Lyndall was the most productive with the home run and a double and three runs batted in. Dugger, in addition to being credited for plating the winning run, had two hits in two trips. Adrian Villalobos also had two hits in four at-bats as well as two RBIs.
Logan Barrick, who actually was on the hook for the loss after giving up two unearned runs in relief of Lyndall in the seventh, picked up the win thanks to the Knights’ two-run rally in the bottom of the seventh.
Kelseyville hosts Lower Lake today in the North Central League I opener for both teams at 4 p.m.
