With a 6 a.m. call time, our Arizona and SoCal Little League teams rose out of bed for one final chance at advancing in the Little League West Regionals.
With Arizona as the home team, Canon Olmsted took the mound. While pitching, Olmsted allowed only four hits in his four innings of pitching, but the team had a few errors. Gavin Janicke was able to score SoCal’s first run of the tournament on a pass ball in the fourth inning. Arizona was able to score two runs in the bottom of the second inning on two basehits and an error.
After a nearly 10-minute review of a pop-fly to the outfield, Eli Simon went up to bat. After just one pitch, Simon hit a three-run homerun for SoCal to take the lead 4-2. He spoke about how he felt during this play.
“Well I was trying to get a line drive up-the-middle, right field, and I got nervous because, like, it was taking so long… So I just tried to drive one, and I hit it. I didn’t really think at all. I was just, like, running super excited. It was, like, the best moment of my life. It was awesome.”
Manager Joe Janicke spoke about what the team will be using internally to keep moving forward.
“Confidence. Super confident. I mean, when Eli hit that home run, the energy level in our dugout went 100%. You can just tell, like, the first few innings after we made those baserunning errors, we were down. Man, I was like I don’t want these guys to think their seasons over because of this. We’ve been hitting the ball all day off this guy, and it’s not going to happen, you know?”
Gavin Janicke also hit a two-run homerun, and Jacob Woo scored on a wild pitch, giving SoCal a total score of seven runs.
Arizona scored one final run by Jack Brandt in the last inning, making the final score SoCal seven to Arizona’s three, and forcing Arizona’s elimination.
SoCal has advanced to play Wednesday at 6 p.m. against the loser of the Hawaii vs. NorCal game Monday night at six, so stay tuned.