After nearly a decade of waiting, Edmonton baseball fans once again have a championship team to call their own.
First baseman Brent Metheny’s three-run homer in the fifth inning proved to be the difference in Game 5 of the inaugural North American Baseball League championship final as the Edmonton Capitals clipped the Rio Grande Valley WhiteWings 7-3 in front of 2, 670 fans at Telus Field.
The win gave the Capitals a 4-1 series victory and marked the first professional baseball title by an Edmonton team since the Triple A Trappers took home the Pacific Coast League championship in 2002.
For Capitals manager Orv Franchuk, the win wasn’t his first in Edmonton after being a part of two PCL championship squads as the Trappers hitting coach in 1996 and 1997.
“I’ve got a World Series ring with the (Boston) Red Sox, I have a lot of other rings, but this one means a lot to me personally,” Franchuk said after the win. “I don’t like to get into personal stuff, but it’s kind of like I made the full circle. I started my career here … I came back here and it’s my first year, and we won a championship.”
While the ending was a storybook one for Edmonton, the beginning wasn’t. Rio Grande Valley came out swinging in the top of the first with left-fielder Brandon Decker leading off the game with a hard-hit single up the middle. That was followed up by second baseman Wilmer Pino’s RBI triple to right-centre, cashing in Decker to give the WhiteWings the early 1-0 lead against Edmonton starting pitcher Lou Pote.
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The WhiteWings added one more run when centre-fielder Cory Patton’s single to short left field scored Pino, pushing the lead to 2-0.
But Pote wasn’t about to roll over in his final game as a pro.
A draft pick of the San Francisco Giants in 1990, Pote announced in July that this season would be his last. He got some stellar defence to help cap his 21-year professional career in style, going seven innings, surrendering only two runs and striking out six.
Edmonton got on the board in the fourth with help from one of baseball’s rarest plays. WhiteWings catcher Gabriel Ortoz was charged with catcher’s obstruction, putting Capitals’ J.D. Closser on first base. Second baseman Enrique Cruz and shorstop Rex Rundgren then hit RBI singles to tie the score.
Edmonton didn’t let its new-found momentum go to waste.
With centre-fielder Steve Brown and Linden aboard after walks, Metheny broke the deadlock with a three-run moonshot that just cleared the right field wall, giving the Caps a 5-2 lead.
“I got just enough of it. If it’s 370 (feet) out there, it probably went 372, because I didn’t know it was gone until the outfielder threw up his arms,” Metheny said.
Pote navigated through the sixth and seventh before stepping off the mound for the final time with a three-run lead.
Third baseman Carlos Duncan’s RBI single in the bottom of the seventh stretched the lead to four, before Rio Grande Valley scored a run in a heated eighth inning that saw both Franchuk and Capitals relief pitcher Jorge Vasquez get tossed on two separate balk calls against Edmonton.
The Capitals capped the scoring with an exclamation mark in the bottom of the inning, though, thanks to a towering home run off the bat of Brown to retake the four-run lead.
After stepping in for Vasquez in the eighth, closer Tom Boleska finished things in the ninth, giving the Capitals the win and their first championship in franchise history, allowing their starting pitcher to go out a champ.
“If I had one guy to pitch the big ball game for us, it would be Lou, and he got the call today, and did what he had to do,” Franchuk said. “He settled in and pitched like he pitches. He’s a veteran guy, he knows how to pitch, and he did a helluva job.”
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