NEWS PHOTO JAMES TUBB
Medicine Hat Mavericks second baseman Marshall Burke slides into home plate ahead of the tag in the first inning of the Mavs' 6-2 Game 3 loss Friday at Athletic Park to the Saskatoon Berries.
jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb
A season full of hope and promise for the Medicine Hat Mavericks quickly translated to memory, once again.
The Medicine Hat Mavericks were eliminated from the WCBL playoffs, losing in the semifinals to the Saskatoon Berries 2-1, with a 6-2 loss Friday night at Athletic Park.
After the loss, head coach Kevin Mitchell said they were hurting.
“This game is a big part of my life, I’ve been around it long enough to have had this feeling before, it never gets any easier when a season ends,” Mitchell said. “It takes time to process all the different parts of it and it’s hard.”
But I told the guys, when you care about something, when you open yourself up to really care about something and open the opportunity to be hurt, that’s what this feeling is, because these guys all really care about this team and this game, and they’re hurting right now, as am I.”
The Mavs forced the decisive Game 3 with a 3-0 win Thursday night at Saskatoon after dropping the first game of the series, 6-4 Wednesday at Athletic Park. The semifinals exit comes a year after the Mavs made it to a Game 3 loss in the WCBL finals to the back-to-back champion Okotoks Dawgs.
Medicine Hat led 2-1 through five innings before the Berries tied the game up at 2-2 in the sixth Friday. The game remained tied until the ninth when Saskatoon unloaded for four runs on five hits, winning the series and signalling an early end to summer ball in Medicine Hat.
The Mavs entered the playoffs as the slight favourite in the series, sitting second in the East division with a 33-23 record to the third-place Berries 31-25. They were limited offensively in the series against the WCBL’s expansion franchise, scoring just nine runs in three games, with Saskatoon scoring 12.
“We had different stretches where things weren’t going well,” Mitchell said. “At times it was our bats, at times it was our pitching, at times it was our defence, and unfortunately in the first-round playoff series, we just didn’t swing it well enough. We pitched pretty well, we played pretty good defence, but four or five of our more productive bats were all cold at the same time, and that happens. The timing was obviously very unfortunate.
“Saskatoon is very well coached and they had a pretty good plan to attack our hitters. They kind of took away some things that we’ve been really good at throughout the course of the season.
The Mavs’ top bats were limited; outfielder Micah Dvorak knocked their lone home run of the playoffs and he was one of only three Medicine Hat bats to hit .300 or better (Marshall Burke, .385 and Tyler Vanneste, .364). Outfielder Jordan Phillips and catcher Nick Thibodeau, who were among the WCBL’s top hitters in the regular season, hit just .214 and .182 respectively, with a Phillips double the lone extra base hit between the two of them.
Medicine Hat’s pitching held them in the series. Josh Landry worked eight shut-out innings in the Game 2 win, striking out 12 batters. Jack Novak started Game 3 and stuck out six batters through six innings, with two misplaced fastballs turned home runs by the Berries’ Nolan Sparks, the only blemishes.
While looking at the series, Mitchell says they weren’t playing their best baseball.
“It’s such a short sprint through the playoffs, it’s important to really have things going well, and we just weren’t clicking at that time,” Mitchell said. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that, it’s just the nature of baseball and the timing of it. So from that standpoint, we just felt like it wasn’t our time.”
Just like that, a long summer of baseball at Athletic Park comes to an end and the outlook turns to the 2025 WCBL season. As he reflected on the season, Mitchell shared his gratitude for the Mavs, the league, staff, fans and players for another summer of fun and hope in the city.
“There’s a lot of people that make this happen every summer and without them, it wouldn’t happen, so I’m really grateful,” Mitchell said. “In terms of our team and our performance, it was a blast. We had a really electric group and a ton of talent, guys who could really do some special things.
“Of course we want to still be playing today but I said this last year, too, it only ends the right way for one team and that wasn’t us this year.”
[…] first-round upset of the Medicine Hat Mavericks, who scrapped out a Game 3 win thanks to a four-run ninth inning at Athletic Park, had fans of the […]
[…] first-round upset of the Medicine Hat Mavericks, who scrapped out a Game 3 win thanks to a four-run ninth inning at Athletic Park, had fans of the […]