The Mountain View baseball team worked all season to earn the right to have two chances to make it to the Class 3A regionals.
Now the Thunder will get the opportunity to take advantage of that extra chance.
Bonney Lake scored on a bad-hop single in the top of the 10th inning Wednesday, beating Mountain View 8-7 in the opening round of the Class 3A bi-district baseball tournament at Propstra Stadium.
As the No. 1 seed from the 3A Greater St. Helens League, Mountain View has two chances to win one game in this tournament to advance to the state round of 16. The final chance will be Saturday at Heidelberg Park in Tacoma.
Before that game, the Thunder will have to shake off Tuesday’s disappointment.
The Thunder rallied from four runs down in the sixth inning to force extra frames, then got beat on the toughest of plays.
Taiki Green hit what appeared to be a routine grounder to third with two outs and the bases loaded. The ball took a wicked bounce, over the fielder’s head, driving in the go-ahead run.
“That’s baseball,” Mountain View coach Aaron Coiteux said. “Good pitch. Routine play. Bad hop. What are you going to do?”
Mountain View pitcher Alex Torson was superb in his five innings of relief before that bounce saddled him with the loss. Torson retired 11 in a row before Bonney Lake’s Nolan Weber got a two-out single in the 10th to start the winning rally.
The Thunder struggled in the field for the first five innings, committing five errors and falling behind 7-3.
Nolan Biggs smashed a two-run home run in the bottom of the sixth to start the comeback.
“It was crazy. The adrenaline was pumping,” Biggs said. “If felt like a pop-up at first. I was sprinting to first base.”
He could jog the rest of the way.
Torson singled and Russel Culverwell was hit by a pitch. The runners moved to second and third on a passed ball, then came home on a two-run groundout by Preston Jones. The ball went up the middle, the second baseman made the play, but Culverwell was waived home and beat the throw to tie the game.
“It shows we have heart. We play through every play, and we don’t really give up,” Biggs said.
The two teams scored twice in the first inning. Andrew Krafve hit a two-run single for the Thunder.
Biggs drove in a run in the bottom of the fourth to make it 4-3 after Bonney Lake scored twice in the top of the frame.
Bonney Lake then scored three runs in the fifth inning, with two runs coming when Mountain View committed two errors on one play.
“The first four or five innings, we played really bad,” Coiteux said. “We couldn’t field. We battled to come back.”
Now, the Thunder hope to take advantage of that two-to-win-one scenario.
