WINLOCK — It’s a dog eat dog world.
Since 1991, the Winlock baseball team has been the underdog in every sense of the word. Year after year, the Cardinals dreamed of postseason glory but came up short.
But Thursday night, the word “underdog” took on a different meaning for a program hungry to taste mid-May baseball. The Cardinals, the lowest seed in the 2B District 4 bracket, knocked off fifth seed North Beach 7-3 in their first district tournament contest in 34 years.
Under first-year head coach Nick Taylor, the Cardinals believe they are the former dog in his mantra of, “It’s a dog eat dog world.”
“It’s high school ball. It’s anybody’s day. You can be a top team, and it doesn't matter what day it is or it’s the baseball gods or if the weather’s just right,” Taylor said. “If the bats are cracking, it’s anyone's game.”
It also helps when junior Kyrin Meehan puts up a masterful performance on the mound and at the plate. He drove in five runs on three hits and struck out 12 batters in only four innings of work.
“My fastball was really there. They were either super late or super early on it. My slider was there too,” Meehan said. “My approach at the plate was just hunting first pitch fastballs and trying to get a knock and some RBIs for the team.”
Meehan was wobbly in the first two innings, walking his first two batters and allowing a runner to score on a wild pitch in the first before leaving two runners in scoring position in the second. The southpaw left all three batters swinging at air in the third.
Winlock gave Meehan a great opportunity to take the lead in the third as Carter Svenson and Hayden Fredericks advanced into scoring position with one out, and he delivered on a pop up that landed just out of the reach of the Hyaks pitcher to score two runs.
Meehan struck out four batters in the fourth as a third strike was dropped to put a runner at first. In the bottom of the fourth, Svenson added to Winlock’s lead with an RBI double to right field, and Meehan’s single down the left field line brought two more Cardinals home to make it 5-1.
The Hyaks inched closer with a run in the fifth, but in the sixth, Fredericks pitched out of a bases-loaded, no-out jam by only allowing one run without a hit.
Leading 5-3 entering the bottom of the sixth, the Cardinals received two insurance runs via a Meehan RBI double and a Tucker St. Paul RBI single. Meehan finished 3-4 with five RBIs and a double at the plate, along with a dozen punchouts while only allowing two hits and one run in four innings on the mound.
Fredericks, an eighth grader, closed out the game with a strikeout and two flyouts to the outfield, and the Cardinals celebrated a feeling they haven’t experienced decades before most of the athletes were born: postseason victory.
“It means a lot. We worked our butts off. I’ve been trying to get to districts for three years now, and finally all the hard work that I’ve put in is paying off,” Meehan said. “We got a lot of young guys, but we’ve got a lot of guys that can come through in clutch moments.”
Although half the team is made up of eighth graders and led by a first-year head coach, Taylor’s Cardinals (5-15, 4-14 Central 2B League) are embracing the underdog mentality as they advance to the district first round against fourth seed Toutle Lake on Saturday at Tinker Field in Long Beach.
“I got a young team. I got handed a fresh team. They’re willing to listen, and that’s why we’re here,” Taylor said.
