Outside the Tribe: When Good Things End, Don't Lose Sight of What Made it Good to Begin With
By Chris Johnson on June 05, 2022 from Outside the Tribe
Every single one of us is well aware of the notion that good things come to an end.
Still, when they do in fact come to an end few of us see it coming. There’s no playbook for such situations because in the heat of the moment we can trick ourselves into thinking that it is going to last forever.
The Bridgeport High School baseball team’s streak of consecutive state championships came to an end at seven on Friday when the Indians fell to Hurricane, 3-2, in nine innings in a Class AAA semifinal game.
Right now the disappointment in not getting to eight overshadows how impressive getting seven was.
When the Indians defeated PikeView 9-4 for the Class AA title in 2016 they became the first school in the history of the state to win three straight baseball titles. Moorefield equaled that feat in 2021 but its quest for four in a row also ended this weekend in Charleston.
The state’s largest consecutive state title streak belongs to Oak Glen wrestling with 13. Parkersburg boys tennis had a streak of 10 straight titles as did Fairmont Senior boys swimming.
Ravenswood won nine straight boys cross country championships. Stonewall Jackson won eight straight boys track and field titles. Northfork had eight straight boys basketball titles and the St. Joseph girls basketball team had a streak of seven straight.
Prior to leaving for this year’s state tournament, I was asked countless times by countless people if I thought Bridgeport could win another one, could the Indians extend the streak to eight.
I don’t have a magic crystal ball and have seen too many things happen to ever guarantee any team winning anything but did I think Bridgeport could win and reach eight straight? Absolutely and I even predicted them to do so.
And honestly, if we re-played the state tournament again this week, I would still pick the Indians to win.
Prior to Friday’s loss to Hurricane, I had seen Bridgeport not only win seven straight baseball titles, I’ve seen the Indians win 14 straight games at Appalachian Power Park. Some of those games they were heavy favorites, some of them they maybe shouldn’t have won. I mean just look at the 17-15 win against Wayne in 2018. How does anyone explain that one.
In all 14 of those games the single biggest factor Bridgeport had going for it was the ability to make teams pay for making a mistake. That mistake could have been a play in the field, being too aggressive on the base paths or not aggressive enough, an untimely walk, a pitcher remaining in the game one batter too long.
Baseball is a funny game. We are talking about a round ball that comes in a square box here. A multitude of things can go wrong in any given game, any given at-bat.
The tendency with a loss is to nitpick it to death. And I’m sure there is plenty of that going around in Bridgeport right now.
But if there is anyone being overly critical right now, hopefully in time you will realize that Bridgeport didn’t do anything wrong against Hurricane. Hurricane just did a few more things right.
That may not make any sense right now to a lot of you but think about it.
Ben McDougal and Chris Harbert were both strong on the mound. They combined to strike out 16 batters and allowed just four hits, two of which were infield singles.
The Indians did leave 13 runners on base but Hurricane left 11. Runners tend to get left on base when there is strong pitching, which Hurricane also had, especially with Owen Gress.
Hurricane’s Damian Witty had three of his team’s four hits, including the walk-off double that scored Brogan Brown with the game-winning run in the bottom of the ninth.
As big as that was, that’s not even Witty’s biggest contribution to the win, not by a long shot.
Witty played the best defensive game I think I’ve ever seen in a baseball game at any level. He made at least five plays in right field that prevented who knows how many potential Bridgeport runs.
The first came in the first inning. Anthony Dixon could not have hit the ball any harder to deep right but there Witty was to make a diving catch on the warning track. The play still resulted in a sac fly and Bridgeport’s second run but it was also the second out and prevented a much bigger inning in a game where runs were at a premium.
Hurricane’s defense was flawless. Witty’s performance in right, Gress made two huge plays in the field, including a leap to snag a hard-hit ball up the middle that resulted in the first of two Bridgeport runners being thrown out at the plate in the third.
Ethan Spolarich and Quarrier Phillips both made a handful of plays at short and second, respectively, that were anything but routine.
Bridgeport had made a habit of getting any one of those dynamic plays in the field to go its way for 14 straight games at the state tournament. On Friday, not one went the Indians’ way.
On top of that, Harbert proved that baseball is also a game of inches in the seventh when he hit what everybody in the park thought was a two-run homer to the opposite field, only to veer foul by a few inches.
Not one player on the Bridgeport baseball team wants to hear me talk about any of this right now and if I was in their shoes I would have that feeling as well.
In time, you will gain a better perspective for the legacy you were part of. Seven straight state championships and the majority of the 11 seniors on this year’s roster played pivotal roles as juniors getting that seventh one. The seventh one which is the one that nobody gave you a chance for because of the move up to Class AAA.
You proved everybody wrong. You showed that Bridgeport can not only compete but succeed in Class AAA. And with a 34-6 record that success continued in 2022.
Not getting No. 8 stings, frankly it probably sucks for you guys. But No. 7 couldn’t have happened without you.
It’s the most dominant run in the history of high school baseball in this state. Nobody can take that away from you.
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