Wade delivers two-run single in bottom of the seventh as Valley Cubs win wild one to reach County game; Brooks’ first homer answers bell for Oxford
CALHOUN COUNTY TOURNAAMENT
Monday’s games
Alexandria 10, Piedmont 9
Oxford 11, Donoho 4
Wednesday’s game
Championship game
Alexandria vs. Oxford, 7 p.m. (JSU)
By Al Muskewitz
OXFORD —Whether it’s dunking on the basketball goal or draping the antlers of a six-point buck around your neck, Sam Wade says as a competitor you always need something to strive for.
The Alexandria Valley Cubs have had a lot of novelties over the years, but the latest brass ring is sure to be a bell-ringer.
Wade delivered a two-run opposite field single with no outs in the bottom of the seventh Monday night to cap a three-run rally that lifted the Cubs to a 10-9 win over Piedmont in the Calhoun County Baseball Tournament semifinals at Choccolocco Park.
The win sends the Cubs to meet top-seeded Oxford in Wednesday’s 7 p.m. championship game at Jacksonville State.
Wade’s reward for delivering the game-winning hit? Wearing the antlers that just became a thing Monday for getting an opposite field hit.
The prize came courtesy of Aiden Brunner, one of four catchers on the Cubs’ roster, who found the trophy in the back of his father’s truck that he drove to game Monday afternoon. He took the deer in Dadeville early last month.
Immediately after the game Ian Cartwright rushed into the dugout to grab the team’s basketball goal, upon which dunking on en masse has become a Valley Cubs’ post-win tradition.
“You need something to strive for,” Wade said. “We’ve been working on trying to hit the opposite way. (Brunner) found it today and brought it to the game. He brought it in there I was like, ‘What’s this for?’
“We’ve been talking about hitting oppo aat every practice. You can always pull the ball, you’ve got to work on hitting oppo. He brought this in and I said ‘What’s this for?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know; we’ve got to figure out something for it.’ We figured out we’ve been working on oppo, you get the antlers if you get an oppo. Now we’ve got to bring it every game. You’ve got to have something to strive for.”
Valley Cubs coach Andy Shaw has seen a number of good-luck charms come into his dugout over the years but said he didn’t know anything about the antlers. But he’s all for his players having fun, as long as it’s clean.
“All that fun they have with the dunking and all that stuff, I’m glad they’re having fun, but I don’t know what it is,” he said.
The Cubs trailed 9-7 going to the bottom of the seventh and had the bottom third of the lineup coming to the plate. They trimmed one run off the deficit when Piedmont pitcher Cassius Fairs threw wildly on Deshaun Foster’s sacrifice bunt looking to move runners. The bunt came after the Bulldogs misplayed a fly ball in the outfield.
Seth Johnson was hit by a pitch to load the bases. Wade fouled one outside fastball off from Fairs and then ripped the next one into right field for his fourth hit of the game and the game-winner.
“First thing is you’ve got to calm down, you’ve got to stay calm,” Wade said. “I went up there and said, ‘Trust in the Lord, man, whatever happens happens, happens for a reason. Went up there and swung. You’ve got to trust Him.
“No matter what you do you’ve got to compete; that’s all you can do. They score, come back in and you score. Make a bad play, you’ve got to flush it; you can’t keep it on you. If you keep it on you, it’ll be one after the other. We’re still working on it, but the main thing is to compete. If you lose competing, you lost competing. But if you don’t compete, you never know what could’ve happened.”
The Cubs’ shortstop expected a battle. Alexandria won a close game in their last meeting and Wade knew the sixth-seeded Bulldogs would want to get even.
Piedmont looked every bit ready. The Bulldogs had leads Monday of 4-1 batting around in the third, 6-5 in the fifth on back-to-back sacrifice flies by Jack Hayes and Noah Reedy, and 9-6 in the sixth after a two-run single by Max Hanson.
“First of all, our pitchers, Sloan (Smith) and Cassius, were lights out tonight,” Piedmont coach Matt Deerman said. “We ask them to have four freebies or less in seven innings and they had one tonight, and that was a hit batsman early in the game. You can’t ask more out of our pitchers.
“We’ve got to do a better job of finishing games, that’s obvious, and making routine plays. We left 10 runners on base tonight. All those things combined is what’s giving us trouble. We’ll get that fixed. The bats were really good tonight. I thought we hit in some key situations and made a couple good plays, but the bottom line is we’ve be better at finishing games.”
There were some fireworks in the bottom of the fifth following a home plate collision between Piedmont’s Austin Estes and Alexandria catcher Austin Jeffers that resulted in one ejection, no runs being scored and runners being sent back to their previous bases because time had actually been called on the field.
Alexandria 10, Piedmont 9
Piedmont 031 023 0 – 9 12 6
Alexandria 104 011 3 – 10 13 2
WP: Andrew Allen. LP: Cassius Fairs. 2B: McClane Mohon (P), Jack Hayes (P), Jake Austin (P), Ian Cartwright (A).
R.J.’s happy accident
OXFORD – To Oxford baseball coach Wes Brooks’ way of thinking, home runs are simply “accidents.”
No hitter worth his batting average goes to the plate looking to hit it out of the park. The goal in batting practice – and Oxford had it three times Monday – is to always put on a good stroke and if all the physics line up then maybe it’ll leave the yard.
Well, if that’s the case, there was a really happy accident that happened for the Brooks family in the sixth inning of the Yellow Jackets’ 11-4 victory over Donoho Monday in the Calhoun County Tournament semifinals at Choccolocco Park.
R.J. Brooks, the coach’s nephew, hit his first varsity home run over the right centerfield fence to highlight the third of the three big innings in the Jackets’ overall formula for success.
Brooks homered in the preseason umpires’ clinic tournament, but that was just an exhibition. His first homer came Monday night off Judson Billings.
“We’re not trying to do that; we’re just trying to hit hard line drives,” R.J. said. “At the end of the day you’re just trying to hit a hard line drive to the back of the net. When you’re in the cage you don’t want to hit balls in the top of the net, you just want to focus on hitting hard barrels to the bat. That time you barely miss it you’re going to get under it a little bit, it’s going to fly.”
He admitted, though, it was exciting to see the ball leave the yard and the dogpile at the plate that awaited him.
“When you hit a home run late like that you kind of feel like you put the team away,” he said. “It gives the whole team a boost. It inflates everyone up and kind of lets the other team down.”
In his at-bat the inning before Brooks tripled to right-center and rode home with a pseudo-inside-the-park home run when the relay throw got past the third baseman. For the game, Brooks was 2-for-3 and scored three runs.
“I was just haulin’ tail,” he said. “I knew I hit that ball and I saw that guy, he didn’t get a good hold of it, so I was a digging for third. It was a close play. A better throw right there probably gets me out, but I beat the ball there, went by and saw it, popped up, ran home. I ain’t gonna lie, my quads were shaking.”
Oxford jumped out to a 5-0 lead after two innings against former Yellow Jacket Peyton Webb, fulfilling two more of Wes Brooks’ Big Five principles for success (scoring first, extending the lead), but Donoho rallied with four in the fourth. Billings delivered the big blow in the Falcons’ big inning, a bases-loaded single that cleared the bases when the Jackets kicked it around in the outfield.
But Oxford answered that rally (another element to the formula) in the fifth, then finished it off with the help of R.J.’s homer and then some in the sixth.
“If we don’t play our best after (Donoho’s rally) and we just give in after that, they’re going to come back right there and beat us,” R.J. said. “We always have to keep our A-game up and can’t ever let them have any moments and take the lead back.”
The top-seeded Jackets will take on second-seeded Alexandria looking for their first county title since 2019 at JSU’s Rudy Abbott Field Wednesday at 7 p.m.
Oxford 11, Donoho 4
Donoho 000 400 0 – 4 6 4
Oxford 410 033 x – 11 10 3
WP: Hayes Harrison. LP: Peyton Webb. 2B: Carter Johnson (O), Chance Griner (O), Hudson Gilman (O), Payton Watts (O). 3B: R.J. Brooks (O), Payton Watts (O). HR: R.J. Brooks (O). [*** read more]
