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ROBSTOWN — When it was all over, when
Boerne's gut-wrenching, heart-aching, season-ending, seventh-inning
collapse was finally complete, few in the Greyhounds dugout
could quite believe how it had all unraveled.
They didn't count on a pitcher who hadn't
lost a game in more than two years losing a three-run
lead in the bottom of the seventh, couldn't have envisioned
a sure-handed shortstop airmailing first base on a ground
ball that could have ended the game.
Corpus Christi Calallen scored four runs
in the bottom of the seventh off the heretofore-unbeatable
Bradley Suttle to swipe a clinching 6-5 victory in Game
2 of the Region IV-4A championship series Saturday at
Fairgrounds Field.
The game — and the Greyhounds' Class
4A state title defense — ended with Calallen scoring the
winning runs on a two-out throwing error by Boerne shortstop
Ray Martinez.
"It's not the storybook ending we
were expecting," Boerne first baseman Taylor Spalla
said. "You hate to see it end like that."
Certainly, it wasn't a fitting finish
for Suttle, a senior who for much of the past two years
has been as automatic as a sunrise.
Going into the game, he had won 26 consecutive
decisions dating to his sophomore season. Heading into
the bottom of the seventh with a 5-2 lead, Suttle offered
little indication that this game would end any differently.
His teammates, certainly, never dreamed
as much.
"Losing and Bradley," Spalla
said, "just don't go together."
Yet pitching with a sore shoulder that
had kept him off the mound in Game 1 and that coach Chuck
Foster admitted "wasn't 100 percent," Suttle
couldn't fend off Calallen's seventh-inning charge.
A two-run, no-outs homer from Calallen's
Randy Broughton — the first Suttle had allowed all season
— cut a 5-2 Boerne lead to 5-4 and opened the door.
With its rally, which came before an
estimated crowd of 2,200, Calallen (35-4) earned its ninth
trip to the state tournament since 1993. Boerne (27-7)
earned an early playoff exit.
"I take more blame than anybody
else," said Suttle, who went 4 for 4 with a solo
home run. "I probably underestimated them a little
bit there at the end."
Still, Suttle almost escaped.
With the Greyhounds ahead 5-4 and one
out separating them from the start of Game 3, Calallen's
Daniel Alonzo hit a grounder directly at Martinez.
Martinez stopped it cleanly but overthrew
his first baseman.
The ball bounded into the dugout and
never came out. Boerne's season went with it.
Two runs were in and the ballgame over.
Afterward, Foster defended his senior
shortstop, an all-state tournament selection last year.
"This loss shouldn't get pinned
on Ray," Foster said. "That play doesn't define
his career."
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