KELSEYVILLE >> It wasn’t until a high, high fly ball into medium-deep left field settled into Jason Gentle’s glove that the Kelseyville Knights could finally exhale on Saturday afternoon against the Del Norte Warriors.
In the moments leading up to the final play of the game, it was white knuckle time for the Knights on a day when nothing came easy in their 5-4 quarterfinal-round victory in the North Coast Section Division IV baseball playoffs at Lloyd Larson Field in Kelseyville.
No. 2 seed Kelseyville (24-1-1), which advances on to the semifinals for a second year in a row and is home Tuesday to play No. 3 St. Joseph Notre Dame at 5 p.m., overcame a shaky start to beat the Warriors (14-12) by the slimmest of margins.
“They’re a good team, we’re a good team,” Kelseyville head coach Lou Poloni said following the game. “We battled. This was like a lot of our games earlier in the season.”
It was the fifth one-run game for the Knights this season and their fourth win. Three of those games, not counting a 1-1 tie with Arcata in early March, came in the Knights’ first nine contests.
Kelseyville overcame five errors – three of them during Del Norte’s two-run first inning – and a 3-0 deficit to pull out the victory. The Knights scored five unanswered runs to go up 5-3 before things suddenly tightened in the top of the seventh.
Winning pitcher Logan Barrick, who improved to 13-0 and became the first Lake County pitcher to win that many games in a single season, was rapidly approaching the 110-pitch game limit as the inning opened. He quickly disposed of the first two hitters, getting a couple of groundouts with only three pitches expended.
And then momentum flipped to Del Norte with one tremendous Cole Harper at-bat. Barrick fell behind Harper 3-0 and then worked the count back to full before Harper launched a tape-measure home run down the right-field line and over the fence to make it a one-run game.
“It was pitch 108 when he that home run,” Poloni said of Barrick’s pitch count.
Barrick went back to work on Noah Thomas, who lined a 1-1 pitch into center field for a single.
Poloni had to bring in a reliever at that point and the call went to Jonah Lewis, who moved from third base to the pitcher’s mound as Barrick took his place at third. Lewis, the winning pitcher in Kelseyville’s 10-0 first-round playoff win over Lick-Wilmerding four days earlier, walked Ryan Janeiro on five pitches, which moved Thomas into scoring position for Johnnie Rafalowski.
Each of Lewis’ first two pitches to Rafalowski were balls and the tension mounted even more as the Del Norte fans were whooping it up. Rafalowski skied the next pitch into left field for the final out, Gentle squeezing the ball as he caught it.
While it wasn’t a tough play for Gentle, the performance of the Kelseyville defense earlier in the game meant that no one was taking the game-ending catch for granted.
“We struggled, especially early on,” Poloni said. “We did just about everything we could do wrong in that first inning.”
And that included misjudging one fly ball in center field, which resulted in a triple, and flat out dropping a line drive to right field that should have ended the top of the first with no runs scored. Instead it led to the Warriors taking a 1-0 lead. With runners at first and third following an infield error, the runner at first broke for second and intentionally ended up in a rundown so that the runner at third could break for the plate. Kelseyville’s throw home arrived in plenty of time but it also arrived about five feet above the leap of catcher Randy Pfann and plunked off the backstop as the second run of the inning crossed the plate.
“We work on that early break play every single day in practice and they (Warriors) ran it worse than any other team in Northern California and we still blew it,” Poloni said.
While the Knights could do nothing on offense in the first two innings against Del Norte starting pitcher Janeiro, the Warriors added to their lead in the top of the third, again taking advantage of a Kelseyville infield error to lead off the inning. Janeiro’s one-out RBI double made it 3-0.
The Knights needed a big hit to get back into the game and they received two of them in the bottom of the third. Jacob Beck led off the inning by banging a full-count pitch into center field for a single. He was forced at second on a grounder off the bat of Kyle Ashworth, who advanced to second when Pfann was hit by a pitch. Adrian Villalobos advanced both runners into scoring position on a grounder to second base that he nearly beat out for a hit, and both runners raced home on a sharply hit Kyle Ellis single to right-center field.
Ellis (2-for-3) lined hard to the shortstop to start a 6-3 double play in the bottom of the first but came through when it most counted for the Knights.
“He has a real easy swing and he’s been killing it for us,” Poloni said of his senior shortstop.
Barrick worked out of a minor scrape in the top of the fourth when the Warriors put a runner at third base with one out and couldn’t score. Kelseyville tied it up in the bottom half on a leadoff double by Lewis to the base of the wall in left field and Gentle’s RBI single that caromed off third base and trickled into left field as Lewis raced home.
After Barrick retired the Warriors in order in the top of the fifth, the Knights moved ahead to stay in the bottom half. Pfann reached on an error to open the inning and Villalobos’ sacrifice bunt advanced him to second for Ellis, who came through with another RBI single. He advanced to second on the throw home and scored from third base later in the inning on a Lewis sacrifice fly.
Barrick scattered five hits and allowed just one earned run in his 6 2/3 innings. He struck out nine and walked two. When he moved to third base in the top of the seventh after being relieved by Lewis, Del Norte head coach Travis Johnson, who was in the third base coaching box, stepped onto the field to shake his hand.
“I don’t care if your background is coaching in some remote Alaskan town where they play six-man baseball, that’s an accomplishment,” Poloni said of Barrick’s 13 wins in a single season.
And if the Knights can find a way to be St. Joseph Notre Dame in the semifinals, Barrick will have a shot at winning 14 in the Division IV championship game come Friday or Saturday against the winner of the other semifinal Tuesday between No. 1 seed St. Mary’s and No. 13 St. Patrick/St. Vincent.
“I know we’re going to come out and play hard and hopefully find a way to win,” Poloni said when asked about Tuesday’s semifinal against St. Joseph Notre Dame.
