Link Report for Sun. 9/16 - Stars Lose 9th Inning Lead, Biscuits Are Champs

[Mass Haas]

http://www.brewerfan.net/images/store/dailylinkreport.jpg

 

 

[Mass Haas]

Huntsville: LHP Steve Hammond at home vs. Montgomery (Devil Rays), 5:50 PM pre-game, 6:05 gametime; deciding Game Five for the Southern League Championship

 

Audio link:

http://www.huntsvillestars.com/

 

Huntsville Box Score / Game Log:

 

http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?sid=milb&t=g_box&gid=2007_09_16_monaax_hunaax_1

[Team Canada]

Fantastic outing by Steve!

 

Mass, can you believe you're done? http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Mass Haas]

Luis Pena coughs up a 3-1 9th inning lead -- Stars down to their final three outs, unbelievable.

[Mass Haas]

Wow, season-ending double-play grounder in the bottom of the 9th -- Huntsville loses a 4-3 ultra-heartbreaker, all the details in the AM, chime in during the overnight if you wish.

[Team Canada]

Ouch. I didn't even notice that the game wasn't over yet. That's gonna hurt over the offseason..

[biedergb]

What a bummer -- 3 outs away from a championship. Well still a heckuva post-season: 5 teams in teh playoffs, and 3 league championship series. Alas, no titles.

[hawing]

Tip of the cap, as always, to Mass Haas for a job well done. Get some sleep!

[colbyjack]

Luis Pena has been playing with fire his last several outings, and he picked a bad time for it all to catch up with him. At least he's done a nice job this year putting his name back on the prospect map. Congrats to the Stars for such a successful season, as I don't think many people gave the Stars much of a chance to repeat their 2006 success last spring.

 

Nice to see Steve Hammond save his best start of the year for the final game of the year. Congrats to all of the Brewers affiliates for such a successful season from top to bottom (or at least through Helena).

[Kevbo74]

Hammond was awesome, and when I heard Luis Pena was doing the ninth, I was more than comfortable listing to ,what I thought then, was a Huntsville Championship. Harsh outing, and I hope it doesn't keep him up too many nights this off season.

Besides scoring on the big error, it's not like the bats were carrying this team to victory, either.

5 Postseasons this year (hopefully soon 6) - I have no complaints. It's been great...

 

Maas, thanks for your dedication! Know it or not, I took advantage of your posts every day!

[Mass Haas]

Huntsville Site Game Summary:
Link, text follows --

http://www.huntsvillestars.com/news/news.asp?newsId=1369

Huntsville's Season Ends in Heartbreak

Sergio Pedroza hit the game-winning three-run home run in the ninth inning to lift Montgomery to a dramatic 4-3 comeback victory that won the Southern League title in game five Sunday night at Joe Davis Stadium. The Biscuits became the first team to win consecutive titles since the Montgomery Rebels won three straight from 1975 through 1977. The Stars lost for the first time in 66 games when leading after the eighth inning.

Luis Pena, who went 12 for 14 in save chances in the regular season and cashed in both opportunities in the playoffs, took the hill for Huntsville in the ninth with a 3-1 lead and gave up a leadoff single to Chris Nowak before Brendan Katin made a diving catch on a John Jaso liner for the first out. Gabriel Martinez followed with a single to move Nowak to third before Pedroza launched the first pitch he saw over the wall in left-center field for his first long ball as a Biscuit. He spent the entire regular season at high-A Vero Beach in the Florida State League, where he hit 22 home runs.

Former big leaguer Tim Corcoran took the mound in a save situation for the Biscuits in the ninth and struck out Mat Gamel to open the frame before Brendan Katin singled and was replaced by pinch-runner Mike Goetz. Lou Palmisano walked and Steve Moss hit a ground ball towards the middle that was fielded by shortstop Reid Brignac, who stepped on second to force Palmisano and threw to first to double up Moss to end the inning, game and series.

Nowak, the series MVP, doubled in Brignac with two outs in the first to put the Biscuits on the board. Montgomery scored first in all five games in the series and maintained the lead until the fifth inning when Fernando Perez dropped a Michael Brantley fly that allowed Katin and Palmisano to score to give the Stars a 2-1 lead. Alcides Escobar legged out an infield hit that plated Brantley to push the home team's lead to two.

Stars' starter Steve Hammond went seven innings, giving up a run on four hits, walking one and striking out a season-high nine. He allowed only two singles over his last six innings and was replaced by Robert Hinton, who left with runners at first and second and two out in the eighth. Sam Narron came on to get Brignac to ground out to end the threat.

Biscuits' starter Richard De Los Santos lasted six frames in his fourth start of the season, allowing three unearned runs on five hits. He stranded a runner at third with one out in the second and fourth innings in his longest outing of the season. Nick DeBarr worked a scoreless seventh and Brian Henderson earned the win with a perfect eighth inning.

Huntsville Box Score:

http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?sid=milb&t=g_box&gid=2007_09_16_monaax_hunaax_1

Huntsville Game Log:
Adam Heether getting picked off first base with one out and a man on third base in the 4th was a killer; in the 2nd inning, Brendan Katin lined out to the pitcher with men on 2nd and 3rd and one out...

http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?sid=milb&t=g_log&gid=2007_09_16_monaax_hunaax_1

[Mass Haas]

Link while active, text follows:

 

http://www.al.com/stars/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/sports/119002054789110.xml&coll=1

 

Stars not aligned

Biscuits' three-run homer in ninth wins Southern League title

By MARK McCARTER

Huntsville Times Sports Staff, markcolumn@aol.com

 

It was a roundhouse knockout punch, saving the boxer on the ropes. It was one of those moments you see on the news when the 100-pound housewife lifts the family SUV to rescue a trapped kid.

 

It was, to one dugout, a miracle.

 

It was, to the other, misery.

 

With the Huntsville Stars only two outs from a championship, Montgomery designated hitter Sergio Pedroza launched a Luis Pena fastball over the left-field fence for a ninth-inning, three-run homer, giving the Biscuits a 4-3 victory in the final game of the Southern League championship series Sunday evening in front of a stunned crowd of 1,431.

 

It was the second consecutive league title for the Biscuits, who also knocked off Huntsville last year.

 

The Stars did have one last chance when Brendan Katin singled and Lou Palmisano walked with one out in the ninth, only to have Steve Moss hit a broken-bat double-play ball up the middle to end the game.

 

Only a few days earlier, Pena had talked about how much he relishes the closer role. "Everything," he said, "depends on you in that situation."

In this case, it was Huntsville's championship hopes depending on him.

 

Instead, after 23 years, the Stars still have won only two league titles on the field in seven tries. (They won in 1985 and 1994, and were co-champs in the 2001 series that was canceled by the 9/11 attacks.)

 

In a funeral-home quiet Stars clubhouse, manager Don Money said, "It wasn't meant to be. It's a tough way to lose it.

 

"Whoo. Goodness," he continued. "Tough way to lose it."

 

It really shouldn't have been an issue in the ninth. Twice Huntsville had baserunners picked off to snuff rallies that could have broken the game open, Then again, its first two runs were gifts, courtesy of a dropped fly by Biscuit center fielder Fernando Perez on a long blast by Michael Brantley.

 

An hour before the first pitch, Money offered the accurate prediction that "it's going to come down to what (starting pitcher Steve) Hammond does."

 

Though Hammond has endured a difficult season, with only one win since July 20, Sunday brought arguably his finest effort. He was knee-deep in hot water in the first, giving up consecutive doubles to Reid Brignac and series MVP Chris Nowak - 11-for-18, six RBIs - for a 1-0 deficit, but would allow only two more hits through seven innings, and had a season-high nine strikeouts.

 

Montgomery put two aboard in the eighth on an Adam Heether error and a walk, then Money called on lefty Sam Narron to face left-handed Brignac. He threw one pitch, getting an inning-killing groundout.

 

That set the stage for Pena, who gave up a leadoff hit to - who else? - Nowak and, with one out, a Gaby Martinez single. Pedroza, called up from Single-A for the playoffs, then ripped his opposite-field three-run homer to left.

 

The fatal flaw was Pena's over-reliance on the fastball. Said Money, "He's got to throw the slider for strikes. Most everything was a first-pitch fastball. It's a hard way to learn a lesson."

 

Offensively, "We had some chances, but we had some bad base running," Money said.

 

Steve Sollmann was picked off second base to end the second inning, then Heether was caught off first in the fourth inning, with potential for big innings both times. In the fifth, they would capture the 3-1 lead on the Perez error and an Alcides Escobar hit - a lead that would, four innings later, go sailing over the left-field fence.

[Mass Haas]

Link while active, text follows:

 

http://www.al.com/sports/huntsvilletimes/mmccarter.ssf?/base/sports/119002064889110.xml&coll=1

 

Stars' hearts soar, break

Contact Mark McCarter of the Huntsville Times at markcolumn@aol.com or visit his al.com blog at http://blog.al.com/mccarter

 

Most of the fans were standing, flooding the old ballyard with a rare bit of electricity.

 

One of the Stars' workers was headed around a corner, lugging the enormous, bulky Southern League championship trophy to the third base side of the field.

 

Chickens were being counted.

 

The giddiness was barely suppressed by Stars staffers and fans and, truth be known, probably in the dugout.

 

It was the nervous energy of shaking a champagne bottle, awaiting the explosion of foam.

 

The Huntsville Stars were two outs from their fourth championship.

 

Nerves were on edge. Blood-pressure counts might read like bowling scores - 210-182. It was contagious hypertension.

 

"You've heard it in the past," Stars manager Don Money had said only a few hours earlier. "The Cardiac Kids. That's this team."

 

This wasn't heart attack time, though.

 

It was heartbreak.

 

Luis Pena, the Stars' able closer, gave up a three-run homer to Montgomery designated hitter Sergi Pedroza with one out in the ninth inning.

 

That erased a 3-1 Huntsville lead. It also stole the Billy Hitchcock Trophy.

 

The theft would become official moments later, when Steve Moss bounced into a game-ending double play.

 

As the Biscuits celebrated behind second base, and Moss walked slowly toward the dugout like a man headed to the gas chamber, shards of his broken bat lay on the infield grass.

 

To go with the broken hearts.

 

The champagne bottle would burst open elsewhere.

 

"They can carry (the trophy) to the other side now," a downcast Money said, sitting at his desk, eyes bleary.

 

Outside, in the players' quarters, the only sound was the noise of a shower, some muffled conversations, the clanking of equipment being stuffed into bags for long trips home this morning.

 

Two outs away.

 

All those cardiac moments they had survived. But this, in the ultimate game, flatlining.

 

Think back to April, to when those bags were being unpacked for the long summer, you say to Money.

 

Would you have imagined that team being here, in a championship game?

 

"Umm-uh," he said, shaking his head. Negative.

 

Too few prospects. Too many question marks. Too many young players making the jump.

 

But who knew that a new edition of "Cardiac Kids" would emerge?

 

The Stars won both halves of the Southern League North. They took the first half by winning a 16-inning game on a Saturday night and clinching the next day on a wild pitch. They won the second half with two days remaining in the race. They set a franchise record for consecutive wins.

 

They won a wild series with Tennessee in the SL North playoffs, that time when Luis Pena went Houdini on Sept. 10, escaping a two-men-on jam in the ninth that time.

 

They made this decisive game nerve-wracking, twice snuffing rallies by having runners picked off, and permitting a pair of runners in the eighth.

With this team, though, it wasn't so much about heart attacks.

 

It wasn't even, in the big picture, about heartbreak.

 

It was mostly about heart.

[Mass Haas]

David Weiser's

 

http://www.starsboxscore.com/

 

JUST LIKE BOBBY THOMSON

TWO OUTS AWAY, PENA SERVES UP 3-RUN HR IN THE 9th

 

It's funny, but it's true..... You play a whole season for one, just one game. The only one that really matters -- the championship -- and in baseball, no matter what the situation, it sometimes comes down to one pitch....... That was certainly true, tonight....... One season, one game, one pitch.

 

Luis Pena's fastball to Sergio Pedroza in the 9th inning with one out shifted a 3-1 Huntsville lead to a 4-3 Montgomery lead and the Southern League Championship tonight before a crowd that seemed much larger than the 1,431 that was officially announced.

 

Hindsight is so easy. The only ingredient is "if" ..... And the one big "if" in this case is: if only Don had said to hell with convention and stuck with Sam Narron after he got the last out in the 8th, and gone to him in the 9th...... This game, after all, was all this season was all about, and it all boiled down to protecting a 3-1 lead in the 9th....... My way of thinking is -- stick with Narron, who came in for Robert Hinton with runners on 1st and 2nd, and let him finish this game. If he gets into trouble, put Pena in there. But Don went with convention and put his closer in there to pitch to the middle of the Biscuits' lineup -- Chris Nowak, John Jaso, and Gabriel Martinez.

 

I understand the decision......... To give Pena his due, he saved 12 games this year after Marino Salas took his 17 saves and 1.42 ERA to Nashville last July 17, and his ERA was a respectable 2.89. He did a fine job down the stretch (seven saves, 1.74 ERA in August and September), and had only one bad game like this one out of the 34 he pitched during the regular season (getting racked for four runs on five hits in 1 2/3 IP vs. Mobile in a 10-6 loss, May 23.)....... But he lost four games during the season in situations where he couldn't harness that fastball of his. And any batter who could meet that blazing fastball of his solidly with the bat, would be capable of using that same force to drive it out. And perhaps seeing Pena try and work himself out of a bases-loaded, one-out jam in Game 5 of the Northern Division Playoffs vs. Tennessee brings up another issue. Was he truly capable of handling the playoff pressure?

 

Pena faced eight batters in the 9th........ He not only had problems harnessing that fastball (three first pitch balls), but also was hit hard each time........ Chirs Nowak (3, 8, .371 in the series), on a 2-1 pitch singled to left. Brendan Katin then saved Pena and the Stars with a nice diving catch of a sinking liner off the bat of John Jaso, who hit the longest foul ball I had ever seen at Joe Davis Stadium in the 7th, going at least 450 feet into the trees way out in right field..... Pena evened the count on Gabriel Martinez, but he hit a crisp one-hop liner to left-center. Steve Moss quickly threw it into 2nd, seeing no chance of throwing out Nowak who was going for 3rd........ With runners on the corners, designated hitter Sergio Pedroza (5-for-14 vs. the Stars in the series to this point), lined the first pitch he saw from Pena over the wall in left-center for a three-run home run to take away a Stars' 3-1 lead, nourished by Steve Hammond, Hinton, and Narron since the 6th inning, and give it away to Montgomery....... Now I know how Dodger fans felt when Bobby Thomson circled the bases in 1951.......... The cheering switched from behind the Stars' dugout to the first base side, where a large contingent of Montgomery fans were silent for most of the game.

 

After getting an 0-1 start on Patrick Cottrell, Cottrell hit a hard grounder up the middle for a single. Erold Andrus got Pena's first pitch and hit it hard, but Michael Brantley rushed into left-center to snag it for the 2nd out. Pena walked his 7th hitter, Fernando Perez, on a 3-1 count and with runners on 1st and 2nd, Josh Asanovich flied out, deep again, to Moss to end the inning.

 

Everyone in the Stars dugout had their rally caps on, turning their caps inside out....... I did, too, and convinced former WHNT weahterman Chris Davis, standing in front of me, to do so also........ Corey Thurman turned around to the fans, as Mat Gamel stepped up, and with a stern look, conducted the fans in a round of synchronized clapping to drown out the Biscuit fans, who were pretty loud....... Don't get me wrong. Huntsville fans were cheering balls and strikes from the moment this game started, but the mood had changed over once Pedroza hit that home run.

 

Gamel fouled a couple pitches off in back of the plate, took a ball low, then struck out swinging on Tim Corcoran's 81 mph slider...... Corcoran, who made 16 starts for the Devil Rays last season, was sent by the Rays on rehab to Montgomery after being DLed on June 8 with right elbow strain. He stayed to post a 6.75 ERA in 17 1/3 innings, but had a pair of post-season saves, including one in Game 2....... It looked like Brendan Katin was going to go down, too, on strikes, but on Corcoran's 0-2 pitch, he singled up the middle. Lou Palmisano, celebrating his 25th birthday, got ahead 3-and-0, and eventually walked to send Katin, the game-tying runner, into scoring position....... Steve Moss, on 1-and-1, tried to hit one up the middle, but shortstop Reid Brignac met the ball, which wasn't hit solidly, scooped it up, touched 2nd base to force Palmisano, and threw to first to double him up, ending the game, snuffing out the Stars fans last hope as quickly as Pedroza's home run had.

 

Steve Hammond pitched a gutty game. Perhaps his finest of the season. You couldn't have asked more from him....... But after retiring Perez and Asanovich on just seven pitches in the 1st inning, Brignac and Nowak hit back-to-back doubles to give the Biscuits an early 1-0 lead. Nowak's hit missed being foul by less than a foot, as it skipped off the infield dirt on the third base side, then quickly traversed its way into foul territory....... It's a game of inches. No doubt about it........ After Nowak's double, Hammond retired 15 of the next 16 hitters....... He finished his last inning -- the 7th -- by striking out Jaso, Martinez, and Pedroza in order....... Hammond used his 88-92 mph fastball to set up a particularly vicious slider that was working for him tonight....... Most of his nine strikeouts, a season-high for him, were on sliders.

 

A throwing error by Adam Heether that led off the 8th inning looked ominous, but turned out to be harmless, but not so harmless was Fernando Perez's three base error in the 5th........ Michael Brantley, who stepped up with just one hit in 19 at-bats, stroked a hard liner to center. Perez chased it back and got a glove on the ball, which would have ended the inning, but he dropped it. Brendan Katin, who doubled to left with one out, and Lou Palmisano, who was hit by a pitch (something the official box score doesn't reflect), scored to give the Stars a 2-1 lead...... Next, Alcides Escobar fouled off a pitch, then beat out an infield single, scoring Brantley. Hernan Iribarren, who finished the game 0-for-3 and the series with a .359 average, hit into a force to end the inning....... Opportunites to score after Mat Gamel and Brantley hit two-out doubles in the 6th and 7th innings, went wasted -- the insurance runs so badly needed tonight.

 

Montgomery's successful defense of the championship was the first in the Southern League since the Montgomery Rebels won three straight from 1975-1977.

 

I've had enough of baseball's heartache for the night...... Look for my selection of the year's Top Ten games in a few days.

[Mass Haas]

MiLB.com's coverage includes the Montgomery audio from the killer home run and the final out. Both radio calls are fine, the announcer is naturally off-the-chart excited, though:

 

http://www.minorleaguebaseball.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070916&content_id=303418&vkey=news_milb&fext=.jsp