Baseball: Southridge routs Sumner 11-0, finishes third in 3A championships

The baseball gods taketh, and then they giveth right back.

The Southridge High School baseball team put the errors and ejections of Friday’s semifinal heartbreak in the rear view, and instead took advantage of a bounty of freebies from Sumner for an 11-0, six-inning cakewalk in the Class 3A third-place game Saturday morning at Gesa Stadium.

Senior Ryan Sanders went the distance for a four-hitter in his final start for the Suns, who got five walks and four errors from an overmatched Sumner club.

“I’m proud of the kids,” said Southridge coach Tim Sanders, who watched the game from a seat along the right-field line after being ejected from Friday’s 5-4 loss to Lake Washington. “They won their last game. It’s just unfortunate it was for third.

“The kids put in a lot of good work, a lot of hard work, and I’m super, super proud of their effort.”

In the aftermath of the win, the third-place trophy — Southridge’s best finish since winning the title in 2004 — seemed small consolation to the Suns, who came to Gesa with state championship hopes.

“Definitely not what we wanted, that’s pretty obvious,” said Ryan Sanders, Tim’s nephew. “But it was nice getting that win, knowing that we’re leaving Southridge on a win.”

Of course, it could always be worse. You could be Sumner (20-8), which had never reached the semifinals at the 3A or 4A level and got 10-runned both days without scoring a single run.

On the bright side for the Spartans, it was a spartan crowd of a few hundred for the 10 a.m. start, so there weren’t too many witnesses.

Effectively wild

Ryan Sanders issued his three walks in the first three innings but also avoided any hard contact until Nathan Harrell’s bullet scorched the left-field line with one out in the third.

But after getting off scot-free with the bases loaded and one out in the second, the Suns (22-6) weren’t exactly quaking in their cleats. A crisp 6-4-3 double play capped the inning, the second twin-killing of the game for Southridge.

A 1-2-3 run through the fourth and fifth innings was ended by a couple of singles and a hit batter to start the sixth. It was the fifth bases-loaded inning the Suns faced on the weekend. Once again, they got away clean, thanks to a called third strike, a shallow fly to center and an unassisted grounder to third.

“You just have to bear down and say they’re not going to score runs,” Ryan Sanders said, noting that he wasn’t doing anything special on the mound.

“I was just pounding fastballs today, trying to get them across the plate, and a little slider.”

At the plate

While Sanders was dealing zeros, the Southridge hitters looked like heroes, using Sumner’s gifts to take full advantage of their six hits.

They got on the board in the third, when a ball through the wickets at short turned a leadoff single by Ethan Sanders (Tim’s son) into a run.

Southridge loaded the bases in the fourth on a hit batter, a walk and a single by Jashaun Simon. But unlike the Spartans, the Suns cashed in as Ethan Sanders laid down a perfect squeeze bunt that he turned into a hit. Two runs scored on the play thanks to a bad throw. One out later, Chad Crider doubled to center to score two more for a 5-0 lead.

A run in the fifth was the essence of manufacturing a score: a hit batter, stolen base, grounder to the right side and fly ball to left.

Southridge broke it open in the sixth as two Sumner pitchers combined to throw 12 consecutive balls to start the inning. With everybody playing in, Jake Harvey hit the first deep ball of the weekend over the center fielder’s head for a two-run double. After yet another Sumner error, Ryan Sanders followed with a two-run single, giving him four RBIs on the weekend.

While the Suns players weren’t wearing too many smiles as they accepted the third-place trophy, a day at the ballpark was exactly what the doctor ordered after Friday’s disappointment.

“The best thing to do in these situations is to play the next day,” Tim Sanders said.

NOTES: Ethan Sanders finished 2-for-2 and scored two runs. Bryce Grigg also scored twice for Southridge. ... The Suns were missing senior catcher Jake Kirchhoff, who was ejected after Friday’s game. Sophomore Lane Hailey, a regular starter at DH, moved behind the plate in his stead. Hailey drove in a pair of runs on sacrifice flies.

This story was originally published May 28, 2016 at 2:01 PM with the headline "Baseball: Southridge routs Sumner 11-0, finishes third in 3A championships."