2A Baseball: Big Inning Gives Tigers First State Championship Since 1993

YAKIMA — All it took was one inning.

One extended, efficient, back-breaking, momentum-shifting inning.

Centralia scored all of its runs in the top of the fifth inning here Saturday night to beat Selah, 8-3, and win the Tigers’ first state baseball championship since 1993.

“I have never been more excited in my entire life,” Centralia catcher Jacob Monohon said, with wide eyes and a massive grin, after the Tigers were awarded the State 2A championship trophy on the infield at County Stadium. “This is what we’ve been working our butts off for, for however many years we’ve been playing baseball.”

A solid performance from pitcher Jake Sutton kept Centralia in the game against Selah, a regular in the state final four and the owner of a 25-1 record that had never given up more than 6 runs in a game prior to Saturday.

The Tiger half of the fifth inning changed everything.

“We always have that one inning where we just blow up, and get a ton of runs,” Sutton said. “You always hope to get it before the other team does, but we always know we’re going to get it, eventually.”

It started with a leadoff walk to, conveniently, leadoff hitter Gavin Kerner, followed by an infield single from Sutton.

Drew Fagerness then singled, driving in Kerner and putting the Tigers on the board, albeit still in a 2-1 hole. Centralia had managed just two hits — both Sutton singles — through four innings off of Selah’s lefthanded starter Connor Davis, and squandered a bases-loaded, no-outs opportunity in the first inning.

“We weren’t hitting the pitcher too well, but we figured it out and started a rally, and that was all we needed,” Fagerness said. “That pitcher, not to say anything bad about him, but he’s not something we can’t handle. We were seeing him, we were just a little nervous, I think.”

Monohon then stroked a single, driving in a run and tying the game at 2-2.

“It’s a little thing we call W-D-P-O. I’m not gonna say what it means, but we just came together as a group,” Monohon said. “We started stringing hits together, started scoring runs, they walked us, and we just took advantage of it.”

Third baseman Christian Peters then singled, bringing in another run and giving Centralia its first lead.

Sutton and Peters — the winning pitcher in Friday’s state semifinal — had chatted, each trip out to the field, about a big offensive inning.

“Every time, on defense, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have that inning for you, we got you,’” Sutton said. “And they got me.”

Peters’ single signaled the end of Davis’ tenure on the mound. Reliever Clark Stenby took over, threw a wild pitch that scored Monohon’s courtesy runner, and gave up an opposite-field single to Nolan Wasson.

“We had some real good at-bats that inning. Wasson was huge,” Centralia coach Rex Ashmore said. “We were going to bunt him on the second pitch, and they threw a ball, and I decided, ‘Let’s let him swing.’ That inning just strung itself together so nicely.”

That single set the table for Hodges Bailey, who lined double down the third-base foul line to score 2 more runs and put Centralia ahead, 6-2. Mitch Halbleib was hit by a pitch, and Max Dulin laid down a sacrifice bunt to push Bailey and Halbleib to second and third — and mark the first out of the fifth inning, on the ninth Tiger to the plate.

Kerner, making his second trip to the dish in the inning, knocked a single to score what turned out to be the last 2 Centralia runs of the game.

“We’ve had streaks before, but that was definitely one of the biggest streaks,” Sutton said. “You can’t ask for a better time for it. I couldn’t ask for a better way to end my career.”

And Sutton, needing nine outs with a 6-run lead to play with, went back to work, getting two nice plays from Peters at third in a 1-2-3 fifth inning.

Selah added a run in the sixth, on a two-out RBI single from pinch-hitter Cort Dietrich, but Sutton closed the frame with a strikeout.

“I have caught Jake Sutton my entire life, and I believed in him, without a doubt, that this guy was going to come out with a W tonight,” Monohon, a catcher, said, “because of his heart and how he throws when he’s ready.”

Ashmore told Sutton, who had thrown over 100 pitches, before the seventh inning that he was on a hitter-to-hitter basis in the final frame — meaning that, should a runner reach base, a reliever would be employed.

Sutton gave up a single with one out, but got a grounder to shortstop and struck out the final batter on four pitches to end the game.

“His pitch count was up, but he’d told me, ‘Hey, this is my last game of my career, I’m good to go,’” Ashmore said. “They got a guy on base, and after the game he said, ‘I thought you were giving me one guy.’ I told him I change my mind sometimes.”

Sutton finished with three strikeouts, with a single earned run, three walks and five hits.

“He was still hitting any spot he wanted to, and that’s the main thing,” Ashmore said. “He hits his spots, and kids will get themselves out sometimes. That last pitch, he was 120 in, and that’s exactly where we wanted the pitch at, and he painted it right there.”

Sutton also finished 3 for 5 at the plate. His single in the first inning came sandwiched between two Selah errors that helped load the bases with no outs.

The Vikings, however, got two quick fly balls too shallow to allow for Kerner to tag up from third, and escaped the inning on a ground ball to the third baseman for a force out.

“We do really nothing, and that first inning killed us,” Ashmore said. “And then we just strung things together so well that (fifth) inning. And when Jake Sutton’s on the mound, and he gets a lead, he’s nails.”

The Tigers finished the season with a 19-7 record, in their first final four appearance since the Lyle Overbay-led Tigers won the State 3A championship in 1993. Centralia finished tied with Tumwater for the Evergreen 2A Conference regular-season title, then lost to Tumwater in the District 4 championship game.

The regular season, though, wasn’t without its ups and downs. Three of the Tigers’ senior starters missed a handful of league games with suspensions, and Centralia lost at least once to each of the other teams in the EvCo.

“We have went through so much adversity this year, with all the suspensions, and all the crap going on,” Monohon said. “We come back and make a statement to everybody here that we are the No. 1 team in the state, and that we are the best damn baseball program in the entire state.”

By the time the playoffs rolled around, however, the Tigers were ready.

“We’ve had a lot of things going on, outside of the game, but the closer and closer we got the more we realized that this isn’t just something we can play for as a dream — we’re here,” Sutton said. “Waking up this morning, it was crazy to think that it’s not, ‘Oh, we could make it,’ it’s, ‘We’re here!’”

Afterparty

The postgame party started on the field just after 10:30 p.m. Saturday night. The game was originally scheduled to begin at 7 p.m., but was pushed back to 7:45 p.m. due to the length of the day’s prior games. The last game on the schedule was also the longest, taking nearly 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete.

Centralia assistant coach Bryan Zurfluh was ejected in the second inning, after arguing with the field umpire about a Selah runner being ruled safe at first base.

“I didn’t even see what happened. I was too busy getting Zurf running in from right field,” Ashmore joked. Ashmore and Zurfluh coached together in Adna for 15 years before Ashmore took the Centralia job. Zurfluh coached the Pirates the next year — the senior season of his son, Cooper — before joining Ashmore as an assistant in Centralia. Ashmore’s Pirates made the final four in 2007 and 2008, finishing third and second, and Zurfluh’s Pirates made the championship game in 2013, only to fall to DeSales.

“I don’t know if words describe it,” Ashmore said. “I didn’t even see what happened out on the field (at the end), I was just in disbelief.”

The on-field party was a mixture of hugging, screaming, drenching Ashmore with an ice bucket and the players signing autographs.

“I’ve never been so happy in my life,” Kerner said. “It’s crazy. I love it. It couldn’t go any better right now.”