In mosquito baseball, teams are allowed to score a maximum of three runs in any one inning and that rule came into play in the bottom of the second inning of Sunday’s Prince George Youth Baseball Association Icebreaker tournament final at Volunteer Field.
The bases were loaded and the Athletics were trailing the Diamondbacks 2-1 when Brett Peebles came to the plate to face pitcher Aiden Smith. Peebles, one of the top hitters on his team, did not disappoint. He clubbed a Smith pitch into shallow left field to clear the bases and rounded third base right on the heels of Carson Colebank and they both beat the tag at home plate.
Worried his speedy base runner might be running too fast for his own good, A’s coach Shawn Miller barked out instructions from his spot in front of the dugout along the third-base line. “Don’t pass him, Brett.”
Peebles crossed home plate a split-second behind Colebank and delivered all that was needed for a fourth run, but as per the rules, only the first three counted.
In the sixth inning the 11-year-old A’s catcher would get another chance to be the hero. He delivered the most important run of the day – the one that gave his team a victory.
Diamondbacks pitcher Dalton Matvichuk was struggling to throw strikes in the pivotal sixth and all of a sudden there were three A’s on base. Peebles walked. Kaleb Miller was hit by a pitch and Matvichuk tossed one into the dirt, which gave catcher Peyton MacKay trouble. That was the green light Peebles was waiting for. He raced in from third base and was mobbed by his teammates as the A’s walked off with a 5-4 win.
“I was a little scared we might strike out for the second or third out and I just was hoping I could make it home and after that throw back I made it,” said Peebles. “I was just scared we might lose that inning and have to play them in another open inning and that we might lose the game. I just wanted to win with this team a lot.”
Peebles has hit home runs before but Sunday’s big hit in the second was his first grand slam in six years of baseball.
The A’s won three games to qualify for the final.
“I’m very proud of the kids, they never gave up all weekend,” said Miller. “All weekend we had to fight through games. With the pitching rules, all our arms are limited and these kids stepped up to the plate and I’m proud of each and every one of them. We ran out of pitchers in the game before this and so the pitch count makes it very difficult.
“These kids are super-aggressive and they did a great job on the basepaths.”
A’s leadoff hitter Riley Jickels came in to relieve starting pitcher Lucas Peacock in the top of the third inning with the A’s leading 4-3. The 11-year-old lefthander was tossing strikes right away and struck out the side. But in the fourth inning the Diamondbacks got to Jickels with back-to-back doubles. Jaxon Levesque hit to short centre field and the next batter, Cash Forsberg, delivered him from second base with the tying run.
The A’s threatened in the fifth with runners at second and third and nobody out but reliever Matvichuk got himself out of trouble with a couple of strikeouts and made a nice defensive play to end the inning, tagging out Zach Gobbi who tried to steal home from third on a passed ball.
In the D-backs’ half of the fifth they loaded the bases on Jickels but he got out of it unscathed, forcing Levesque to ground out to Reed Fox at first base to send the game to an extra (sixth) inning.
“It feels really good to win,” said Jickels. “That was our game against them and we won. Their pitchers were a little bit too good.”
The D-backs’ bats weren’t too shabby either, especially early in the game. MacKay went yard and Matvichuk belted a triple for a 2-0 Diamondbacks’ lead in the first inning. MacKay led off the game with an inside-the-park home run and did it again in the third inning, scoring on an overthrow to third base.
“That made me happy,” said MacKay. “It’s hard to beat them.”
From January to mid-May, while the fields were buried in snow, MacKay was among a group of mosquitos who spent time practicing indoors at the Northern Sport Centre with the league and the Northern Baseball Academy. All that batting cage time taught MacKay to turn his leg into his swings to generate more power and that seems to have paid off for the 11-year-old.
MacKay, Peacock and Peebles are on the 12-player Prince George mosquito all-star team coached by Derek Wood, Mike MacKay and Tony Beetlestone and they’ll be busy this summer with road trips to tournaments in Kamloops and Kelowna and the provincial championship on the August long weekend in Chilliwack.
“I’m excited about that, it will be my second year,” said Peyton MacKay. “You get to travel and stuff. I think well have a good team, most of the players were on it last year, too.”
It was billed as the icebreaker but with temperatures in the mid-20s under a blazing sun, ice melter might have been a more appropriate title for the three-day event. The PGYBA house league season is now over and playoffs begin this week. The A’s, who finished second in the 11-team league, will draw a first-round bye and won’t play until Friday. The fourth-place Diamondbacks will play their first playoff game today.
“Especially for our kids, if you look at the beginning the year to where they are now, it’s a big feat to make the final and they did very well,” said Mike MacKay. “It’s the final game and we’ve been running out of pitchers. That’s what happens when they’re only allowed to throw so many to save their arms. We were trying to scrape the bottom of the barrel and I thought the kids did great.”
In the bantam Icebreaker at Rotary Field, which featured five bantam teams and one midget squad, the bantam Twins posted a come-from-behind 7-6 victory over the midget Astros.
