It was all about pulling everything together at exactly the right time.
The Bald Eagle Area Bald Eagles and the Bellefonte Red Raiders just completed amazing runs through the Mountain League (they tied for first place), the District 6 playoffs and the PIAA state baseball tournament.
The fact that they both won PIAA baseball championships will be a source of pride for the players, parents, coaches, school officials and communities for years to come.
And the way each team went about achieving it all just adds exclamation points to the whole thing: BEA didn’t allow a run in the quarterfinal, semifinal or final game, while Bellefonte’s offense averaged just under nine runs per game throughout the state tournament and answered every call.
It was simply a matter of both teams continuing to do what they did best, but at a higher level and under the intense pressure of lose-and-you’re-out tournaments.
Bald Eagle, for example, pitched and played defense extremely well all season, but the Eagles were off the charts in the PIAA games.
During the regular season, they gave up more than five runs in a game just four times (once in a 7-1 loss to Bellefonte), but they gave up only four runs in their entire run to the state title — and those runs all came in the first-round, 10-4 win over McConnellesburg.
Otherwise, senior pitcher Tyler Serb shut out Karns City, 6-0, combined with Wyatt Coakley to shut out Sharpsville, 1-0, in 10 innings and threw a two-hitter in the 11-0 PIAA final win over Mount Union on Saturday at Medlar Field.
In all, Serb pitched 19 scoreless innings in the tournament and gave up a total of eight hits and two walks (!) and struck out 26 hitters. Talk about rising to the occasion.
And the offense, when it needed to, came up with enough for BEA to win and move on. The Eagles managed just six hits against Sharpsville and didn’t score a run in the first nine innings of the game.
But they came to bat in the 10th and strung together hits by Camron Watkins, Kahale Burns and, fittingly, Serb to take the walk-off win.
Then in the final, as if to emphatically put a stamp on a magical season, they scored 11 runs in the first three innings against a team they had already beaten twice with an Eagle pitcher on the mound who hadn’t given up a run in almost three weeks.
Game over.
In Bellefonte, there were other ideas.
During the season, the Raiders scored over 10 runs in a game 10 times, including a 12-4 win over Tyrone, a 15-5 win over Penn Cambria and 13-0 over Mountain League arch-rival Clearfield.
In the playoffs, the Raiders needed every one of the 10 runs they scored against Greater Latrobe. Latrobe rallied for seven runs in the last three innings, but Bellefonte was ahead by eight and Peyton Vancas was able to get the final two outs on a grounder and a fly out to save the day, 10-9.
Indiana was next, and the Raiders actually fell behind in the third inning, 5-4, but they had much more to come.
Bellefonte put up seven runs over the next three innings and Vancas pitched two perfect relief innings as the Raiders moved on, 11-5.
Against Hopewell in the PIAA semifinal, the Vikings broke out to a 5-0 lead after some Raider fielding miscues, and things did not look promising.
But once again, Bellefonte was up to the challenge. The Raiders put up five runs in a four-hit, two-walk fifth inning — highlighted by Triston Heckman’s two-run double — and climbed back on top, 6-5.
Then starter Dominic Capperella and Vancas combined to shut out Hopewell the rest of the way, and their team survived again, 6-5.
In the AAAA final on June 17 at Medlar Field, Capperella dominated on the mound, the Raider hitters piled up nine hits and seven runs, and the PIAA state championship came home to Bellefonte after a 7-1 win over Dallas.
It was quite an emotional scene when the game ended, especially after seeing next-door neighbor Bald Eagle Area accomplish the same thing just a few hours earlier on the same field.
Two state baseball champions from the same league, two miles apart, playing on the final day of competition of any team from the now-finished Mountain League.
Quite a way for the league to go out.
Pat Rothdeutsch covers high school and Penn State sports for The Centre County Gazette. Email him at sports@centrecountygazette.com
