AUGUSTA, Maine — Hunter Finck arrived at Morton Field for this year’s Class A baseball championship game already bearing a formidable resume in the sport.
He recently was honored as Maine’s Gatorade Player of the Year and the All-Southwestern Maine Activities Association’s most valuable player this spring, and Finck already has committed to play baseball at the University of Alabama after graduation.
Now he and his teammates are champions after he drove home the game-winning run with two out in the top of the 11th inning as Gorham outlasted Bangor at 3-2 to capture its first Class A crown in the sport.
“It’s a dream come true,” said Finck, best known for his pitching skills. “It’s a great memory I’ll have for the rest of my life.”
Bangor was bidding for its 15th baseball state title, answering Gorham’s two-run uprising in the top of the sixth that broke a scoreless stalemate with two runs in the bottom of the inning as this battle of the Rams eventually reached extra innings.
But on this last day of spring that brought with it gusting winds often directly in the faces of the batters and combined with gutsy pitching on both sides to limit run production, Finck had the final offensive answer in the 11th against Bangor reliever Nick Llerena.
Llerena, who replaced starter Lucas Rutherford to start the seventh and allowed just one hit over his first four innings, got the first two outs on just five pitches in the Gorham 11th.
But Cooper Whitehead was hit by a pitch and Wyatt Washburn was walked before Finck lined a 1-0 pitch to right field for his third single of the afternoon to drive home Whitehead.
“It was a curveball outside,” he said. “Coach (Ed Smith) has been telling me this whole season to just go oppo (to the opposite-field) with those, and obviously it worked out for us and scored the game-winning run.”
Washburn, who relieved Gorham starter Miles Brenner in the eighth inning, yielded a ground single up the middle to Bangor’s Trey Tennett to lead off the Bangor 11th, then retired the next three batters to cap off Gorham’s 15th straight victory and set off a gold glove celebration.
“The Washburn kid came in and did a great job pitching, and so did [Llerena],” Bangor coach Dave Morris said. “I just thought it was a great baseball game, one of those games that the team that got a break and capitalized was going to win, and they did.”
Bangor had hoped to send Morris into his announced retirement with a third state championship in his 10 years as the Rams’ head coach. Morris replaced Jeff Fahey as head coach in 2017 and immediately helped Bangor extend its state-championship streak to five years with titles in his first two years at the helm.
The veteran coach concluded his Bangor tenure with those two state titles and five Class A North championships along with three additional regional-final appearances en route to a 121-47 record at his alma mater.
While the final chapter of his final season didn’t end the way he and his team hoped, there was appreciation for the quality of the effort by both participants.
“Our guys played so hard all year long, and I think we started to peak over the last couple weeks,” said Morris, whose team ended its season with a 16-4 record. “Then for both teams to come out and play a game like this, I’ve been in a few state championships and I’d say this was a pretty darned good one.”
Gorham (19-1) had more scoring chances in the contest, but Bangor was able to thwart nearly all of those threats and stranded 13 baserunners. Bangor left just four runners on base.
Gorham finally broke through against Rutherford in the sixth, sending eight batters to the plate and capitalizing on a leadoff single by Finck, two hit batters, a fielder’s choice, an RBI squeeze bunt by Sawyer Smith and a bases-loaded, two-out walk to Luke Taaffe to give the A South champs the game’s first lead.
Bangor answered immediately against Brenner, who to that point had allowed just two baserunners over the first five innings.
Tennett reached on an infield error to start the rally and went to second on an errant pickoff throw before scoring on Gavin Glanville-True’s double to the right-center field gap.
Ethan Sproul’s groundout advanced Glanville-True to third base before Jacoby Harvey delivered the tying run with a sacrifice fly to left.
Kyle Johnson followed with what might have been a go-ahead home run on a less windy day, but Brenner shook off what turned out to be a double off the bottom of the center-field fence to retire the next batter and leave the contest stalemated.
“That’s baseball,” Morris said. “You’ve got to play with the conditions.”
