These 2 players made it big among top sports Tri-Cities stories of past 21 years
Local athletes who became Major League Baseball players in the last 21 years and Hope Solo are my next installments of the top 21 sports stories of the past 21 years in the Mid-Columbia.
This region has seen plenty of area athletes get paid to play baseball in the past 21 years, the majority of them never making it past the minor leagues.
But only eight of them have been able to don a Major League Baseball uniform between 2000-20.
Jeremy Bonderman
Perhaps the biggest name has been Pasco’s Jeremy Bonderman, who pitched nine seasons in the big leagues.
The right-handed starter spent most of those seasons with the Detroit Tigers, from 2003-10.
Bonderman had a career record of 69-81, with a 4.91 earned run average.
His best season proved to be 2006, when he went 14-8, striking out 202 batters in 214 innings over 34 starts.
He started in Game 4 of the World Series that year against the St. Louis Cardinals, going 5 1/3 innings before being pulled with a 3-2 lead. The Cardinals came back to win that game, and took the Series 4-1.
Bonderman spent part of one final season in 2013, pitching first for Seattle before finishing again with the Tigers. He’s been retired since.
Here are the other seven area players who saw some MLB action:
▪ Walla Walla High grad Eric O’Flaherty had a knack for getting batters out as a situational, left-handed relief pitcher.
Selected by the Seattle Mariners in the sixth round of the 2003 draft, O’Flaherty made the big club in 2006 and pitched there until 2008. He had two separate stints with the Atlanta Braves — one in 2009-13, and the other in 2016-17.
He also spent two seasons, in 2014-15, with Oakland — and was traded to the New York Mets from the A’s in 2015.
His best season was with Atlanta in 2011, where he appeared in 78 games, pitched 73 innings, and giving up just 8 runs for a 0.98 ERA.
▪ Richland High grad Travis Buck played baseball at Arizona State University before embarking on a six-year career in the majors. Buck was a left-handed hitting, right-handed throwing outfielder, who was a spot starter in the outfielder for much of his career. Starting in 2007, he played for four seasons with Oakland, spent 2011 with Cleveland, and finished up in 2012 with Houston. In 253 games, Buck had a career record of a .243 batting average, 20 home runs, and 95 RBIs.
▪ Hanford High grad Jason Repko spent all or parts of seven seasons with three different MLB teams: 2005-09 with the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2010-11 with the Minnesota Twins and in 2012 with the Boston Red Sox. Like Buck, Repko got the occasional start in the outfield and was a good defensive substitute late in games. He finished with 360 games played, batting .224 with 16 homers and 67 RBIs.
▪ Eric Yardley, a Richland High graduate, made his MLB debut in August of 2019 with the San Diego Padres. In 2020, the right-handed submariner relief pitcher played for the Milwaukee Brewers, and that’s where he’ll be in 2021. Yardley has appeared in 34 games as a situational reliever, has a 2-1 record, and a 1.80 ERA in 25 innings pitched.
▪ Southridge High grad Shawn O’Malley was a valuable roster addition because of his flexiblity. In his three-year career — 2014 with the Los Angeles Angels, and 2015-16 with Seattle — O’Malley played every position in the field but pitcher, catcher and first baseman. His big-league totals: 124 games, .231 batting average, 3 home runs, and 25 RBIs.
▪ Chad Orvella spent two seasons playing for Columbia Basin College before eventually working his way onto the Tamp Bay Rays roster for three seasons in 2005-07. The right-handed reliever appeared in 69 games, compiling a 5.79 earned run average over 82 innings.
▪ Outfielder Darrell Ceciliani, who also played at CBC, spent parts of three seasons with the New York Mets (2015) and the Toronto Blue Jays (2016-17). In 55 games, Ceciliani batted .190, hit 2 home runs, and had 7 RBIs.
21 for 21: Hope Solo
Perhaps never an athlete from the Tri-Cities ever brought such extreme reactions than did Hope Solo.
It seemed that people either really liked her, or disliked her.
She was either becoming the world’s best female soccer goalkeeper or performing on TV’s Dancing With the Stars; or she was saying something to the media that was getting her in trouble with her team and coach, or getting arrested in family fights.
One thing was definitely for sure: she was a big star for the U.S. Women’s National Team for a good 12-year period.
Solo was a 1999 graduate of Richland High School, where she was a standout forward on the Bombers girls soccer squad.
Solo scored an incredible 109 goals for Richland, leading the Bombers to conference titles her sophomore, junior and senior years. Twice, she was a Parade High School All-American.
But she was also a member of the USA Olympic Development Program, and coaches there felt she would make a great keeper.
So did the University of Washington coaching staff, who had Solo make that transition complete during her time with the Huskies.
During college, she was named a National Soccer Coaches Association of America All-American her last three seasons as a Husky.
When her time with UW had ended, Solo would go on to play professionally in three different U.S. leagues, and in Sweden and France.
The U.S. National Team asked her to come to Athens, Greece, in 2004, to be part of the Summer Olympics. She was an alternate on that squad, but by 2005, Solo had vaulted into the No. 1 keeper position for the U.S. team.
She held that spot through 2016.
In between, Solo was part of United States teams that won two Olympic gold medals in 2008 in Beijing, and 2012 in London.
Soccer fans may remember the gold-medal game in 2008, in which the USA beat Brazil 1-0 in extra time. Solo was a machine, stopping everything that the powerful Brazilians threw at her.
That included a point-blank stop of a laser beam shot from star striker Marta late in the game.
Solo later told the Herald that she was in a zone, and the soccer ball looked like a big beach ball to her.
She mesmerized the Herald with great Olympics stories, such as the late Kobe Bryant calling out her name across the plaza in the athletes village. And Bryant and his NBA teammates watching her and the women’s soccer team play.
Besides the Olympic golds, Solo also was part of U.S. teams that won a gold medal in the 2015 Women’s World Cup, a silver in the 2011 World Cup, and a bronze in the 2007 World Cup.
Her final numbers with the national team: 202 games, or caps; 102 shutouts.
When she retired in 2016, Solo was simply one of the greatest women’s keepers to grace the net in international competition.
Ever.