WHITMAN JUMPS ON TOP OF BLAKE EARLY, HOLDS ON LATE

By Andrew Zuckerman

Two men on base, two strikes, two outs, and a towering drive to deep center field.

It was not what Whitman coach Joe Cassidy wanted to see in the bottom of the seventh with just a two-run lead.

“I’ll be honest, I thought that ball was gone,” he said. “I’m sitting there like, ‘Oh, we’re going to lose on a walkoff home run – are you kidding me?’”

As Whitman closer Brian Gobish watched the ball off the bat, he only had one thought.

“Stay in! Stay in!” he said. “I threw the pitch, and it was a splitter. It was supposed to be a ground ball. It didn’t split, it stayed up, he hit it.”

Blake pinch hitter Ben Hostetter got a good piece of metal on the ball – enough to send it to the warning track. But Whitman centerfielder Max Hilbert read the ball immediately off the bat and got a good enough jump to track it down. Hilbert camped underneath it just short of the fence, and squeezed tight.

Whitman 9, Blake 7. By a few feet.

The Vikings will play Gaithersburg in the 4A West regional semifinals.

“Obviously it stayed in, and it was a good game,” Cassidy said. “And obviously I’m happy that we won.”

Whitman scored all of its runs and had 10 of its 12 hits in the first two innings. Ethan Thompson was a triple short of the cycle, and his two-run homer in the second was the first of his career.

It gave Whitman a 5-2 lead, and Thompson emphatically leaped into the air and onto home plate to finish off his trot around the bases.

“I didn’t really think about it. It just kind of happened,” Thompson said. “I guess it was kind of like an unsportsmanlike move, but I didn’t really think about it like that, so I’m sorry to all the Blake kids. I didn’t mean to show anybody up.”

Thompson and the Vikings would have been even sorrier had they lost after leading 9-2 in the second inning. But that was almost what happened, as Blake chipped away inning by inning.

The Bengals’ Tommy Cunningham completely shut down Whitman in relief; the Vikings managed just three baserunners in the final four innings and often went down 1-2-3.

But it was somewhat surprising to Whitman that Cunningham, who dominated the Vikings in the teams’ first meeting, didn’t start the game.

“[Blake] thought that they were going to beat us with their No. 3 pitcher, so they rested their No. 2 for the next game,” Thompson said. “It was motivating me. I thought that [they’d] give us more respect than that. We only lost to them by one in the regular season, so I thought [they] wouldn’t take us for granted, but [they] did. So they’re going to pay for it.”

Blake managed to cut the seven-run deficit down to 9-7 by the end of the fourth inning, but the Bengals’ bats went silent once Gobish came in.

The senior gave up just one hit in 2.2 innings of relief and didn’t find himself in any jams.

That is, until the bottom of the seventh.

“I want to be in that situation. You live for this,” Gobish said. “You live to be in that clutch situation, and I was just happy to come through.”