Playoffs over for Warhawks

Even if it might have been a tough weekend results-wise for the two summer Kahnawake Warhawks baseball teams still in action, both the U15B girls and U18 mixed team gave it their all.

“I’m very proud of my team and all they have done,” said Roddy Meloche, the U15B girls’ head coach.

His team was playing in the Baseball Quebec Super Regionals in Ahuntsic, where they only had eight players available at the start of the tournament due to injuries and hockey tryouts. As such, they had to call up a player, receiving backup from an athlete from a DDO team in a younger division, due to no local players being available.

They lost their opening contest to the Saguenay Team 10-3, putting them in the lower bronze bracket.

“It was a good game. It was pretty tight to start, and it was only towards the end that it didn’t go as well,” said Jessica Hernandez, the team’s manager - or as she likes to call herself, “momager.”

The reason it stopped going as well was pitching, Hernandez explained. Due to a strict pitch count that would bar players from pitching the next day if they went over a certain number of pitches, and because they were missing some of their regular pitchers, players who pitched rarely or not at all prior to the tournament found themselves on the mound, with mixed results.

In the second game, however, they took down the Laval Tornadoes Black 22-13.

Hernandez’s daughter Iehwatsirahni:ra’ts Gilbert, who had not pitched in a game this season, started for the Warhawks, and the game was finished off by another first-time appearance by Addison Goodleaf.

“They both did amazing,” said Hernandez.

In the third match, she said the girls were ready to play, but the game, which was supposed to be played at 7:15 p.m. on Saturday, was pushed more than two hours due to delays in the other games, something that may have made the umpires tired or less effective.

Hernandez said that one example of that was when their catcher went to ask about whether a pitch was a ball or strike - something that is not unusual to do and the catcher was used to doing all season, she said - the umpire told her to not ask that again.

She felt that that, along with more injuries during the game, including a player needing emergency dental surgery due to a bunt gone wrong, was part of why they dropped the game to the Baseball Charlemagne-Le Gardeur Angels 19-8.

“It just was unfortunate, because the girls were ready to play, they were happy, and it just seemed like it was one thing after another,” said Hernandez.

The team the Angels defeated in the bronze medal game, the Expos Blue, is a team the Warhawks have beaten in the regular season this year, which Hernandez felt they could have done again had they made it that far.

Still, even after the disappointing weekend, she said there is still a lot to be proud of about the U15B girls’ season.

“Our girls really just want to play baseball. They love the game, and they’ve been playing for so long together. They are well-oiled machine when they are playing,” said Hernandez.

“They’re my heroes, all of them.”

The U18 Warhawks, for their part, played in the Beloeil Provincial Baseball Tournament, finishing with a record of 0-2.

They played both of their games against teams that would eventually reach the finals of the tournament, losing 12-6 to the eventual winners, the Baseball Charlemagne-Le Gardeur Angels, and 10-0 to the Ste-Julie Blue Eagles.

“We just got beat by better teams, that’s all,” said U18 head coach Jesse Lahache.

Against the Angels, Lahache feels like although they could have played a little better, the baseball was going to the right places for the Warhawks’ opponents more often than it did for them.

“They were just getting really good hits where we had no chance to catch them,” said Lahache.

“Our pitcher was throwing strikes, and they were hitting them where nobody was. That’s how it goes. That’s the game.”

Against the Blue Eagles, Lahache said that their bats were very strong, with multiple hits going deep into the outfield resulting in relatively easy runs.

Still, playing tournaments this late into the season is a good experience for the players, he said.

“These are teams we’ve never faced before, from different associations. It was nice to play some teams we’ve never played before,” said Lahache.

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