It wasn’t a close game until suddenly it was.
For the first four innings of last Sunday’s B.C. Premier Baseball League championship game in Coquitlam, the North Shore Twins were in control.
A couple of early Twins runs saw the team poised for victory with a comfortable 4-0 lead.
But then the opposing Parksville Royals started to claw their way back, and all of a sudden the Twins cushy 4-0 lead was narrowed to 4-3.
For Twins head coach Brooks McNiven, it wasn’t a surprise.
“We played Parksville six times this season and every game, for the most part, they were fairly close,” he said.
“We certainly did not feel comfortable even up four runs. Luckily, at the end we were able to hold on.”
And hold on they did.
The North Shore Twins are premier league provincial champions for 2017.
For the team, it’s the culmination of a season where they managed a league best 34 wins and pulled out an impressive 6-1 record in the playoffs.
“It had been a focus of ours since we started winter training in January,” McNiven said about the team’s tenacity.
“It was really nice to see it all come together there in the end.”
McNiven credits an impressive team effort for the squad’s success, especially when the Royals started to gain momentum late in the fifth.
“They never really went away. Even when you’re up four or five runs, you still never really feel comfortable because you knew they were very capable of coming back and making it close, if not taking the lead,” McNiven said.
The Twins took an early lead when catcher Noah Or hit a double that brought home second baseman Alec Cumming in the first inning.
In the second, centre fielder Brandon Hupe and Cumming scored runs off another hit from Or, building the Twins lead to 3-0.
“It was a pretty excited bunch, as you can expect,” McNiven said. “A few of them said they’d never wanted anything so bad.”
In the third inning, the Twins cemented their winning run when a hit by Ryan Lim brought home left fielder Robert Mackie.
McNiven was also quick to praise the efforts of Twins starting pitcher Dan Sereda, who netted four strikeouts.
“(He) pitched excellent and I was really impressed with his mental makeup in a big pressure situation like that,” McNiven said. “He pitched really well.”
But although the Twins benefited from a deep bullpen, McNiven acknowledged that the length and intensity of the regular season and playoff run can take its toll, especially on pitchers.
The tides started to turn in the fifth inning when the Royals picked up two quick runs.
In the sixth, the Twins brought out ace pitcher Jack DeCooman to finish out the game.
It felt promising -- until Royals heavy-hitter Shane Rogers sunk a home run that brought the score to 4-3.
McNiven, however, was confident that DeCooman’s experience with the national baseball team would help him settle in.
“We were holding on for dear life,” said McNiven. “He let that home run in the sixth, but then was able to go out and have a one-two-three inning in the seventh to finish it up. He seemed to settle in as we got into the seventh inning and did a really nice job.”
After seven innings of play the Twins stormed the mound; they had won.
Although the Twins had a winning regular season and a successful playoff run, getting to the championship game wasn’t without its challenges.
A less than stellar showing in a playoff game against the Abbotsford Cardinals July 21 led to the Twins being wiped out 11-0.
McNiven’s advice to his team after that loss: forget about it and move on.
“You can lose one game in the tournament,” he said. “Our goal was to finish first in our pool. We were pretty sure that the first place game was going to come down to the game between us and Langley, and it did.”
Last season, the Twins finished first in the regular season but suffered an early exit from the playoffs.
They were determined to learn from that early exit and this season focused on team efforts rather than individual heroics.
“I think we had more depth in our lineup this year,” he said. “Nobody has to be the hero, but anybody can be the hero. That message was given throughout the playoff run.”
Perhaps ironically, the Twins championship win marks only the third team in premier league history that the team with the No. 1 regular season record has also won the big game.
“The league is a very good league and there’s a lot of very strong teams,” McNiven said. “To win the league is one thing – just playing with that level of consistency to finish up with a record like we did is amazing.”
