By Patrick Coleman
D3sports.com
EASTLAKE, Ohio — It couldn’t have been scripted better.
In front of hundreds of fans, with the eyes of thousands of college baseball fans watching online, and with their entire existence hanging in the balance, the Birmingham-Southern baseball team rallied from three runs down in the eighth inning and walked, no, danced off with a 9-7 win in an elimination game at the 2024 Division III World Series against Randolph-Macon.
After a safety squeeze failed to give the Panthers (33-15) the lead in the bottom of the eighth inning, Jackson Webster came to the plate with Andrew Dutton on first and took an 0-2 pitch out, hitting it high off the tarped-off bleachers in left field at Classic Auto Group Park, sending the gathered Birmingham-Southern fans into a frenzy.
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| Jackson Webster meets his Birmingham-Southern teammates at the plate as they celebrate his walkoff home run. Photo by Ryan Coleman, d3photography.com | More photos from this game coming at d3photography.com |
It was Webster’s second home run of the day, and his 15th of the season. He’s never hit a bigger one.
It almost didn’t happen, however.
When the junior first baseman came to the plate, with the winning run on base, he was a little eager.
“The first swing was really, really bad.”
It was a huge cut, on a pitch that was low and away.
“I think I let all my nerves out on that swing and kind of smiled, and gave myself a pat, and apologized to Coach.”
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On an 0-2 count, however, Webster connected.
“He just threw one that I was able to get a hang of, he threw a curveball and hung up just a little too much and I was able to put a good barrel on it. ... Baseball miracles, right?”
Jackson Webster's dad says, "Do your job, Jackson!" And he does! He blasts a two-run walkoff home run and @BSCsports is still alive! Final: Birmingham-Southern 9, Randolph-Macon 7. #d3baseball pic.twitter.com/0McnlJ0WCu
— D3baseball (@d3baseball) June 2, 2024
Right. The program that needed a second life in the form of a Pool C bid just to get into the tournament in the first place, representing a school which literally closed yesterday, found one more miracle as they scored five runs in the last inning-plus to win.
Birmingham-Southern remains in the Division III World Series and plays Sunday in another elimination game, against the loser of UW-Whitewater and Salve Regina.
The Panthers nearly didn’t even need Webster’s heroics, as they scored three in the eighth inning and had Jakob Zito on third with one out. He had hit a one-hop triple off the wall in deep left center to get himself into scoring position. Ty Truett followed with a safety squeeze bunt attempt, but Myles Webb was on top of it and gunned down Zito at the plate. Truett did steal second and came around on a big pinch-hit by Grant Morgan, tying the game.
“Grant Morgan has not played a lot for us this year, but man, he has come up with some huge pinch hits for us,” said Panthers coach Jan Weisberg. “When he got that single through the left side, There's just feelings you have as a coach and I said ‘this game is ours.’ ”
It looked like it really was their game early on. One day after Birmingham-Southern needed five innings to awaken the bats, the Panthers came out swinging. They mashed two first-inning home runs to left-center, by Webster and Charlie Banks, and added a double off the wall in the third inning to take a 4-0 lead.
Randolph-Macon, it turned out, was not fully read in on this version of the script. The Yellow Jackets scored twice in the fifth after Grayson Bush doubled to left-center and Eli Brooks tripled down the right field line. Jordan Hill hit one past the diving glove of Eli Steadman at shortstop to bring in the second run. That cut the lead to 4-2.
In the seventh inning, the Yellow Jackets got it done in an even smaller way. Matt Myers and Bush led off the inning with consecutive hit by pitches, but the rally stalled after a failed bunt attempt ended up in a pop-up to the catcher. Jordan Hill took a called strike three as well. But leadoff batter Jon Quici executed the hit-and-run to perfection, smacking a single through the vacated right side of the field to bring in Myers, and Carter Schmitt, who was 3-for-3 on the day already, made it 4-for-4 when he hit a slow roller to the right side that Steadman had no way to make a play on, allowing Bush to come in from third.
“We saw in warmups he's a splitter guy. He came in to spin it,” Schmitt said after the game. “I was seeing the fastball all day, so I was assuming it wasn't going to get very many fastballs. I left the first one high, and we always talk about adjusting our feet in the box, moving up, just to catch that break out in front.
“And I guess got a little bit too anxious. I caught it out a little bit too out in front, hit it off the end and just bust my tail up the line to see if he can make a play on it, which he didn't. Thankfully it went in our favor.”
Meanwhile, the Yellow Jackets found a pitching solution that worked, as Connor McAuley, the third pitcher of the day, went three scoreless innings. Jacob Lawler came on to pitch the seventh and was dominant.
Randolph-Macon came back out for the top of the eighth and went right back to work, stringing together three singles sandwiched around a wild pitch and a sac bunt to bring Webb around to score the go-ahead run. Myers came in two batters later on a wild pitch by reliever Jacob Fields. And another Fields wild pitch followed, silencing the chants of “here we go, Panthers” and replacing it with the cheers of Yellow Jacket faithful, who found themselves staked to a 7-4 lead after the top of the eighth.
Weisberg had to catch himself to excise the negative thoughts from his head at that point.
“I told the guys in there, when they get the single to go up 5-4, that's one thing, it's doable. But it's kind of that sinking feeling of the way the last two runs came in to make it 7-4, with a couple wild pitches, we have a chance to maybe throw a guy out at third, a ball in the dirt.
“You can't help but think -- it just had the feeling of, this is how it's going to end.
“But with what this team has been through in particular, in addition to (dealing with the thought that), our World Series run or our season may come to an end, with all that we've had hanging on our head, there had to be, you know, some thoughts, and I'll admit it happened to me for a brief second in between innings.
“I started to think about, man, what am I going to say? Am I going to keep it together? Um, and I just told myself, stop. Just stop.”
It was a key moment for Webster as well.
“I was trying to keep it all in. I said a quick prayer and I was like, God, just let me stay relaxed, enjoy the game, either outcome, just relax and have fun playing it. And I just flushed everything. I was able to go out there and put a smile on my face even though we were down three runs.”
Ian Hancock got the scoring started in the eighth with a one-out single down the right field line, and Banks followed with a single to left before Zito's triple scored them both. Truett's run tied it up and Morgan and pinch-hitter Parker Ladd were on first and second when Steadman took a called third strike to end the inning.
Sophomore Charlie Horne came back out for the ninth and made quick work of the Yellow Jackets (33-16), allowing Dutton to come to the plate in the tie game. He led off with the walk off Randolph-Macon reliever Michael Shanahan before Webster's second blast added to the tale of this storybook season.
“I mean, I just saw it started taking off,” said Banks. “I was like, oh, that's it. And I just started losing it, jumping out of the dugout.”
“I knew it was gone off the bat,” said Morgan. “I threw my gear up in the air -- I was in the bullpen. It was awesome.”
But despite the rewrites that the script went through on the way to the win, one thing remained for Weisberg. As he put it, “the fight of these guys is the story of the night.”