N.H. baseball: Kingswood walks off St. Thomas Aquinas in D2 championship thriller

MANCHESTER – The St. Thomas Aquinas baseball team never gave up.

After falling behind 8-0 in the first inning, the fourth-seeded Saints rallied to take a one-run, 9-8, lead in the fourth, but No. 2 Kingswood tied it in the sixth, and scored the game-winning run with no outs in the seventh to escape with a 10-9 Division II championship at Northeast Delta Dental Stadium.

“These kids are some of the best kids I’ve ever been around,” St. Thomas Aquinas first-year head coach Eric Wells said. “I don’t care about baseball players, they are some of the best human beings I’ve been around.”

Kingswood leadoff hitter ruled safe on controversial play in seventh

Brendan MacPhee led off the Kingswood seventh with a double, but St. Thomas appeared to escape trouble when he was caught in a rundown between second and third on a pickoff attempt.

MacPhee swung wide around a tag attempt, and the throw to third got away, allowing him to slide safely into third base. Wells called timeout and questioned the call.

“I asked (if the runner was out of the baseline to avoid the tag during the rundown),” Wells said. “But (the umpire) said he was within the three feet. He’s a great umpire. It’s just one of those judgement calls. I think he had a really good angle, and you’ve got to believe him. He’s got a way better angle than I do.”

Two pitches later, No. 9 hitter Bryan Purington became the hero for the Knights when he lined a base hit over the drawn-in infield and scored MacPhee with the walk-off championship title.

St. Thomas rallies from eight-run deficit in first

Rather than focus on what might have been, Wells wanted to focus on what was. And “what was” on Saturday morning was his team showing the type of resilience that carried them to the championship game.

Trailing 8-0 after the first inning, Wells gathered the team together next to the dugout between innings and shouted, “Don’t give up on me! Do not quit! Every pitch!”

His players responded.

Finn Perry ripped a leadoff double in the second, and scored on a Brady McDonald single. In the third, the Saints chipped away even more.

Conall Ciaschini reached on an error to open the inning, ahead of back-to-back singles by Brandon Skowron and Colin Healy. When the throw to first on Healy’s infield single went astray, it allowed Ciaschini and Skowron to score, while Healy advanced to second.

Healy stole third and scored on a Ryan Gould infield single. Perry followed with an RBI single and scored on a single by McDonald to cut the Kingswood lead to 8-6.

“Getting down 8-0, what do you say but, ‘you’ve got to believe in it,’” said Wells. “And we’ve been a family the whole year. I said if we could get it within a couple runs by the sixth inning, we’d win the game. They believed in it.”

St. Thomas takes lead in fourth

Ciaschini, who had been sick leading up to the game and didn’t start, led off the fourth a pinch-hit single, and Healy followed with a single of his own two batters later. Kenny Avery followed with an RBI double ahead of Gould’s two-run single to give the Saints a 9-8 lead.

The Saints held the tenuous lead until the fifth inning when back-to-back errors put runners on first and second for Kingswood with no outs. Nate Cloos hit an RBI single to tie it. The Knights appeared to take the lead on a sacrifice fly later in the inning, but Wells appealed that the runner who had been at third, left early. The runner was called out, and the inning ending on the double-play, leaving the game tied at 9-9.

Stars for both St. Thomas, Kingswood

Gould finished 2-for-4 with a run and three RBIs for St. Thomas, while Perry went 2-for-4 with two runs and an RBI. McDonald  finished 2-for-3 with two RBIs

Cloos went 2-for-2 with a walk and a hit by pitch, scoring a run and driving in three. But it was pitcher Kolby Brown who was the difference maker. Despite laboring through the two big innings by St. Thomas, Brown stayed on the mound for 120 pitches, and seemed to get stronger as the day went on, notching a pair of strikeouts in the pivotal seventh before ceding to Cloos to get the final out.

“I could see (our) emotions were down a little bit when (St. Thomas) had their big inning,” said Kingswood coach Ben Fournier. “But I knew Kolby just needed a little rest. He’s a big kid and he’s been a workhorse for us all season.”

Fournier said Brown’s performance was exactly what he has come to expect from the senior.

“Without him on the mound, I have no idea what would have happened, but I’m so glad he was out there,” Fournier said. “Normally, in the regular season we probably would’ve taken him out earlier. But this is his last baseball game ever. He’s going into the Army next year. And I told him from the jump, ‘You’re going the whole way.”

The loss put an end to St. Thomas’s nine-game win streak, and Wells said he couldn’t be happier with the team’s growth in his first season.

“They didn’t have to buy in at the beginning of the year,” he said. “It’s hard playing at St. Thomas. We expect their very best effort every day. And they gave it.

Wells credited Bailey White and Camden Stowell, for their relief performances on the mound. White came in in the first inning with the Saints trailing 4-0 and was greeted with back-to-back two-run singles. Three of the runners who scored were inherited, and White went 2 1/3 innings with a strikeout and only one earned run allowed. He was replaced by Stowell, who inherited a pair of runners with no outs in the fourth, but pitched himself out of trouble. Stowell allowed two runs, one earned, in his three innings of work.

“Bailey came in and really stopped the bleeding for us,” Wells said. “When we took him out, I told him, ‘we’re in this game because of you.’ He really stopped that bleeding. You’ve got to give a ton of credit to him.”

St. Thomas senior credits Wells for motivation to come back

Avery said Wells’ energy and confidence was infectious to the team and was a big reason the Saints were confident they could come back from the early deficit. Wells repeated phrases like, “Don’t quit” and “I believe” echoed across Northeast Delta Dental Stadium between innings, and Avery said those were more than just words.

“He brings it all,” Avery said. “He changes everything. He gets us going. We look to him in moments like that and he always delivers. He lives with great energy and he’s amazing. He fires up when we need to get fired up, and he settles us down when we need to settle down.”

Avery, one of three seniors on the team, along with Gould and Aaron Hughes, said he couldn’t be more proud of his teammates, and added that he has high hopes for the future of the program.

“Everyone was giving all they could every play,” he said. “After the first inning, coming out and not giving in, and staying on them with energy the whole time, it made me so happy. As a senior, it felt good to see how much they wanted it and to see they never gave up. The future is bright for these guys.”

Wells said the team has been proving people wrong all year, and although they wanted one more win, he credited Kingswood, and promised the Saints would be back.

“I give a lot of credit to Kingswood,” he said. “They earned it. And our kids earned a lot of respect in this state for what they did this season. Nobody expected us to be here, but we’re here and we’re not going away.”

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: St. Thomas Aquinas comeback falls short in D-II baseball championship