BANGOR, Maine — Josiah Hartley had seen enough of Andrew Waters robbing him of extra-base hits by tracking down the fruits of his previous two at-bats just in front of the center-field fence.
But when Waters was called on to pitch in the seventh inning Wednesday night, the Bangor Senior League baseball slugger had him right where he wanted.
Hartley blasted a 400-foot home run to left-center off Waters with one out in the top of the seventh inning Thursday evening, rallying Bangor to a stunning 4-3 victory over defending champion West University Little League of Houston, Texas, and earning the Maine District 3 champions a first-ever berth in Friday’s Senior League World Series semifinals.
“I was hitting the ball well to the same spot earlier in the game, and I just happened to turn on that one a little more,” said Hartley, who will be a senior at Bangor High School in the fall. “There was a runner on first base, and to bring him around would have put us in extra [innings], and if we then could have played defense that would have been great.
“But I hit the ball and it just carried. It went on its own.”
With a 3-1 record — marking the first time a host team has won more than one game since the SLWS moved to Bangor in 2002 — Bangor finished second in Pool A and will now play at 2:30 p.m. today against Pool B champion Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Not bad for a team that had to go into extra innings in the championship game of its district tournament just to qualify for the SLWS.
“The one thing I feel this team has over all the other teams in the tournament is the competitive edge,” said Hartley, who did not play high school baseball this spring but competed at both the Senior League and American Legion levels this summer.
“We have kids on this team that fight. We may not be the most physically gifted team, but we all battle. We’ve gone through some tough situations, played from behind and come back, but we thrive in these situations, and in front of the hometown fans it’s a big deal.”
Bangor narrowed a 3-0 deficit with two runs in the top of the sixth off Stewart Cartwright, who had earned the save in West University’s 9-7 world championship-game victory over Fremont, Calif., at Mansfield Stadium last August.
Nic Cota singled, stole second and scored on Seth Freudenberger’s triple to center — a play in which Waters tried to make a diving catch but came up empty. Winning pitcher Jesse Wood followed with his second hit of the game, a high chopping single to left field.
Wood then held West University scoreless in the bottom of the sixth, giving Bangor one last chance to make history.
“The coach from the [U.S.] East team came up to me before the game and we were talking about how they hit,” said Wood, who scattered seven hits with three strikeouts and two walks. “They were a good hitting team, obviously, but he said they struggled hitting the outside pitch and that they would try to pull it, so [catcher] Dylan Morris pretty much gave me outside the whole game, and I just tried to get my curve and slider to work.”
Cartwright retired the first batter he faced in the seventh, but Morris drew a six-pitch walk that put the right-hander at the 95-pitch Senior League single-game limit.
So the Texans, who had six pitchers who weren’t eligible to work in this game because of the pitches they accrued earlier in the tournament, turned to Waters.
“We were pushing [Cartwright] to make sure he got to 95 because we knew he was one of their better pitchers,” said Hartley. “We thought once we got deep into their bullpen they’d have a hard time stopping us.”
And Hartley, the first batter Waters faced, turned on a 1-0 pitch, a hanging curveball, and blasted it to the left of the flagpole in straightaway center to give Bangor a shocking lead.
“I got a chance to take a good look at the [new] pitcher when they switched them out, and it gave me another chance to relax,” Hartley said.
“The pitch was right there.”
Wood, his own pitch count at 91, gave way to lefthander Curtis Worcester in the bottom of the seventh.
Worcester, who pitched four perfect innings in a win over Lazio, Italy, on Monday, yielded back-to-back one-out singles to Matt Luna and Davis Atkins, and they both moved into scoring position when Andrew Dunlap grounded out for the second out of the inning.
But Worcester ended the game by striking out Sam Reid on three pitches, the final pitch a swinging third strike on a high fastball.”
“It’s pretty hard to believe,” said Wood after earning his second pitching win of the tournament. “I think the main thing that pushed us through this was heart. I know every single person on this team has heart, and when the situation gets rough we just fight through it together as a team.”
Coming off an emotional 10-5 loss to U.S. East champion South Vineland, N.J., a night earlier, Bangor had to fight through early offensive doldrums against Cartwright and the U.S. Southwest champs.
Cartwright faced the minimum 15 batters through five innings while West University built a 3-0 lead.
The Texans took a 1-0 edge in the second on an RBI single by No. 9 hitter Luke Cone after Hugh Echols had singled and reached second on a wild pitch.
West University then scored twice more off Wood in the fourth, capitalizing on a single by Reid, another RBI single by Cone, and three wild pitches.
But it may have been a case of not fully taking advantage of the opportunities, because the Texans were hitting the ball hard only to have Bangor center fielder Christian Corneil show his range by flagging down six fly balls and line drives over the first four innings.
“We hit the ball hard all game, sometimes they fall and sometimes they don’t,” said West University manager Trey Cornelius. “That’s baseball.
“Other than pray they fall in, you can’t do too much else.”
Yet, with the exception of Hartley’s blasts to deep center that Waters flagged down to end the second and fifth innings, Bangor was unable to generate much excitement of its own offensively.
But as Cartwright began to tire, the District 3 champions awoke — a comeback capped off when Hartley got one more chance at Waters, this time on the mound, and put the Texans’ dream of a second-straight world title to rest with one swing of the bat.
“Tonight, I was standing in the [third-base coach’s] box not saying much,” said Bangor manager Ron St. Pierre, “but I thought sooner or later somebody was going to hit the ball over the fence. I thought it might be Dylan at first, and with Josiah I wasn’t sure because he had been swinging awful hard all day and hitting it right at them. Like he said, he pulled it just enough, though I think it might have gone over in center field anyway at the rate it was going.
“I think it’s still going, isn’t it?”
Bangor (3-1) 000 002 2 — 4 7 2
U.S. Southwest (2-2) 010 200 0 — 3 9 1
Wood, Worcester (7) and Morris; Cartwright, Waters (7) and Echols, Dunlap (7); WP-Wood (2-0); LP-Waters (0-1); Save-Worcester (1); Repeat hitters: Wood (B); Luna 3 (SW), Cone (SW); Extra-base hits: 2B-Waters (SW); 3B-Freudenberger (B); HR-Hartley (B)
