Marmion 16, St. Francis 15
Coaches and players from both the Marmion and St. Francis baseball teams had never been part of something so unusual.
Wednesday's Suburban Catholic Conference game at IMSA had a total of 31 runs and 30 hits in an outing that took almost three-and-a-half hours to complete.
The end result was Marmion winning 16-15 after the Spartans battled back from being down 15 runs.
"A win is a win," Marmion first-year coach Dave Rakow said. "We probably went to the bench a little earlier than we should have…but we came back and won, so that's a positive thing…I learned a couple things today."
"It was the most bizarre game I've ever seen at any level of baseball," added St. Francis coach Rich Janor, who has coached for 10 years. "To be down 15, to be laughed at and to come back with 15 unanswered runs is truly remarkable. Every kid on this team truly believed we could come back, and that was a great thing to be a part of."
The Cadets scored the winning run in the bottom of the sixth on Matt Milroy's groundout RBI that allowed David Brouch to reach home after he led off the inning getting hit by a pitch.
No one would have guessed it would have ended like that after it appeared the Cadets (4-5, 2-1) had the game locked early. They scored 4 runs off 5 hits in the first, led by a first-pitch RBI double from Matt Milroy.
Milroy was at it again when he contributed to Marmion's 11-run, 8-hit second inning when he batted twice and hit a single.
Older brother and starting pitcher Tim Milroy also hit a 3-run home run in the second. After two innings, the Cadets led 15-0.
"Obviously, (15 runs) means we can hit the ball when we want to," said Matt Milroy, who tallied the first and last RBI of the game. "It's early in the year, and we haven't scored a lot of runs yet, and it seemed like today, we really got on the ball and put the ball in play."
Tim Milroy kept the Spartans hitless through three innings. He was taken out of the game when he gave up a hit in the fourth. That's when the Spartans took off.
St. Francis exploded with 10 runs on 7 hits, led by Jason Lombardi's 3-run home run to left field and RBI singles from Matt Malak and Dean Quaranta and a 2-run single from Ryan Snyder.
Three of the runs were scored on back-to-back-to-back RBI walks with the bases loaded.
The Spartans (7-3, 1-2) continued to chip away at the lead with 2 runs in the fifth and another 3 runs in the sixth, led by Mike Pugliese's 2-run double that tied the game at 15.
"We told the kids to do this one (run) at a time, which we did," Janor said. "It really hurts to fall just a little bit short there."
"You've got to give (the Spartans) credit for fighting back," Rakow added.
After Marmion scored the eventual game-winner in the sixth, the Quaranta doubled for the Spartans with one out in the seventh. The next batter, Lombardi, walked, but Marmion turned a double play on the next batter that ended the wind-fueled slugfest.