Game 48 Recap: It Gets Easier as You Keep Going
Ballers Knock Out Freebirds After 7-7 After Nine Innings; Cobb Perfect in Extras
by Joe Horton
WEST OAKLAND—After seven innings, it was tied. After nine innings, it was tied. With the Ballers and Freebirds knotted 7-7, Tremayne Cobb made sure it got untied in a hurry in the knockout round, as he slugged four homers in four swings, and Oakland swept the last series of the season’s first half.
Jeter Ybarra—with his league-leading 21st—and Noah Blythe hit homers in the first inning to stake the home team to an early 3-0 lead that lasted only a half-inning when singles from Yuba-Sutter’s Jordan Donahue and Devon Dixon—coupled with a bad-bounce infield error—made it 3-3.
As pitching coach Jim Dedrick mentioned yesterday, today was a bullpen day for the B’s, and the team used six arms, starting with Griffin Smith, who went 3.1 and was charged with six runs, five earned, when reliever Matthew Maloney was unable to keep inherited runner Devon Dixon from scoring on a wild pitch in the fourth, which saw the Freebirds go up 6-3. After the fourth, Maloney, Brock Mayer, Jake Villar, and Valek Cisneros combined to keep the Birds off the board through the eighth.
Such has been the Ballers’ first half and the Pioneer League in general this season that a three-run deficit felt like a tune-up, and the B’s climbed right back into the game with a fourth inning homer from Nick Leehey and a pair of scoring doubles in the fifth from Jake Allgeyer and Blythe. The game was 6-6 and both teams, perhaps covering their bases just in case the game returned to being a seven inning affair, buckled down and traded zeroes into the ninth.
Langston Burkett, who has become the B’s go-to late inning option, gave up a homer to Zach Chamizo with two outs in the top of the ninth. But in the bottom of the frame, the Ballers immediately put Cobb (walk) and Myles Beale (hit by pitch) on with no outs, and Esai Santos laid down a perfect bunt to advance both. Jaden Collura (1-for-4) was intentionally walked to load the bases, and Jake Allgeyer (2-for-4, two RBI), who had just returned from an injury, earned the tie the hard way, taking this plunker right to the back:
At this point, there were many ways for the B’s to win. A long-enough fly from homer machine Ybarra would do it, or anything worth 90 feet from Blythe after him. The two had bashed all day, combining for two homers, two doubles, five hits and four RBI.
Said Blythe after the game, “I wanted Jeter to win it there. I mean, obviously we want to win it there, but he struck out, and I had to do it myself. And I thought I'd put a good swing on it, and the shortstop made a really good play.” And does his approach change in those big-pressure spots? “I think the approach is the same. I think just like we do every day, just in the [batting] cage…like when you do the most or too much, it's not going to work. So you gotta try to be easy and just do what you've been doing.”
But even when that didn’t happen and the game went to extra time, Oakland had a weapon as potent as any in the league: the knockout round duo of assistant coach James Harris and SS Tremayne Cobb, who has taken every knockout swing for the B’s this season.
Freebird Josh Phillips went first, hitting three past the fences before recording his five outs. Cobb then came to the plate and wasted no time and no outs. Four swings, four homers. Goodnight Yuba, goodnight Sutter, goodnight moon and goodnight mush.
Dispatches caught up with Cobb after his heroics and asked if it was as easy as it looked.
“I mean, when you've done it a good amount of time, you kind of get used to it,” said Cobb. “James [Harris] knows where I like them to hit the ball out, and I wouldn’t say that it’s easy, but it gets easier as you keep going.”
And what about this being a supposed day off for him? His first day off of the season?
“I always want to be the guy in the big moments that we all dream about, you know, when we're hitting the cage, imagining we're having a big moment. Luckily, I was able to come through for the team today.”
One of Cobb’s many moments of outreach in Oakland is reading to children at the West Oakland Public Library. When he read there on June 16, he won Raimondi’s first knockout of the season that night. He read again there on Friday. Does this mean it’s good luck?
“I always love giving back to the kids. Even back home in Maryland I do kids’ camps. So to do it in a new city, a new community, it’s always good,” Cobb said. “Maybe it is a good luck charm. Maybe people would call it good karma, but I wouldn’t call it that. It’s just me being a good samaritan and giving back to the community.”
On a personal note: I’ve seen three of Cobb’s four knockout rounds this season up close: a loss in Glacier, that June library win, and this, in what shall forever be known as The Nine Inning Game. (He also slugged out a victory in Modesto, hitting five). A note to the rest of the league: don’t stay tied with the Ballers.
Odds & Ends
Cricketer Liam Plunkett returned to the lineup and took his first baseball at-bat with two outs in the fourth. He took a ball, fouled off a pitch, and then hit a tapper back up the middle and was thrown out at first. Here’s the official Dispatches video that’s about two seconds too late with Esai Santos standing in the way. If you want way better coverage, check it out here. And if you want some beef with Long Beach about that coverage, we’ve got that too.
The Oakland Zoo on Zoo Day made sure the bullpen’s hot dog toss had something extra: plush animals for the elated kids (and a couple of adults) that flew through the air as though an ark had run aground on Campbell.
It’s frankly getting a little boring asking Jeter Ybarra how it feels to smash home runs at such a pace (he almost almost had another one in the third, save for an unbelievable leaping play by Yuba-Sutter’s Christian Castaneda who pulled the ball back from over the fence)—or even the increasing frequency of his intentional walks (he had such a free pass in the fifth)—so instead we’ll be checking in about his favorite sandwiches. “My favorite sandwich right now that I've been digging is at Ike's Love & Sandwiches: the Barry Bonds on Dutch crunch roll with no tomatoes.”
Video recap from Ben Verhoek.
Joe Horton is the editor of Dispatches from Raimondi.
