Talk about dramatic!

 

In a WECSSO Blue division championship final for the ages, Steve Sabina’s Broncos defeated Terry Renaud’s plucky Relics 19-18 on Tuesday – when Glen Gedge cranked an inside-the-park, grand-slam home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.

 

With misty rain drizzling all morning at the Ciociaro Softball Complex, the Broncos had just rallied with six runs in the (open) top of the ninth, to turn a 15-12 deficit into an 18-15 lead in the back-and-forth final.

 

It took the blue-topped Broncos only five batters in the bottom of the ninth to snatch back victory from the grey-clad Relics. Al Setterington led off by reaching first on an infield error. Mickey Hergott singled, and Jody Baynton advanced only Hergott on a fielder’s choice. Al Raeside then singled to load the bases.

 

Gedge’s hefty blast barely cleared the glove of a Relics outfielder in left-centre, and rolled nearly to Diamond No. 2’s fence. Hergott, Baynton, Raeside and Gedge all scored before the Relics could relay the ball home.

 

Is softball a game of inches? You betcha. Had Gedge’s blast been inches shorter, and been caught by the Relics outfielder, there would have been two outs. Even had Hergott tagged up and scored from third on the fly out, the Relics would have been up two, one out away from the championship.

 

Baynton was the only player on either team to score five runs; he hit two doubles and a single and walked once. Afterward he said the Broncos’ clutch comeback – only minutes after the disappointment of seeing the Relics burst ahead in the top of the ninth – was emblematic of his team’s late-season hitting heroics.

 

“All year we’ve bounced back,” Baynton said. “We’ve had games where we scored 25 runs. We never give up, never quit – no matter how bad it looks. We just keep coming, and coming. It’s a total team effort. Different players rise when needed.

 

“Once we got into the round-robin, we really stepped up. We believed. I mean, the first three games of the round-robin we scored 58 runs.”

 

Baynton said a crucial ingredient in the Broncos’ success was that they prided themselves all season on never sniping at one another. That attitude paved the way for their championship run, once eliminations began last week, he said.

 

“For the entire season, nobody on the team has gotten down on anybody. Everybody has been positive, and I think we all feed off that positive energy. It’s been a great season.”

 

Setterington’s pitching was no small factor in the Broncos’ 2024 championship. His usually well-placed reverse-spinners continually forced opposing batters to pop up, fly out or mis-hit grounders for easy outs. That said, Relics batters – to their credit – on Tuesday scrounged enough good hits off Setterington to have beaten most teams.

 

“Good pitching always beats good hitting, right?” Baynton said. “That’s the secret. Al struggled a little bit today, but he puts that little twist on it and gets the hitters off a little bit, and that keeps them from driving the ball deep. About 95% of the Relics’ hits today were in-betweeners – over our infielders, in front of our outfielders.”

 

The Relics had placed only sixth in the seven-team Blue-division’s playoff-seeding round-robin (truncated by rainouts) from late August to early September. But they won their two elimination games to reach the championship game.

 

On Tuesday the Relics jumped out to a 5-0 lead in the top of the first, and led 7-4 after three innings, before the Broncos’ bats got hot. The Broncos took their first lead in the bottom of the fifth, 12-11. A three-run seventh gave them a 15-12 lead heading into the decisive, dramatic ninth.

 

“There are no superstars on this team,” Baynton said. “It’s a good group of guys who gelled at the right time.”