A trio of losses over the last few days has sent the Southeast Performance Pump Twins to the lower division for midget baseball provincials.
The Twins ended the Saskatchewan Premier Baseball League midget AAA season with an 8-22 record in the regular season after a pair of losses at Lynn Prime Park Saturday afternoon and will go to the Midget AA Tier I provincials at Unity next weekend. The Twins lost 9-7 Thursday to the league-leading Regina Wolfpack, and 9-2 and 7-6 Saturday to the Regina A’s.
Winning the three games last week would have ensured their place in midget AAA provincials but both they and the Northwest Prairie Pirates (Lloydminster) will join the midget AA provincials this weekend.
In the second game of their Saturday doubleheader, the Twins tried to claw back after surrendering five runs in the fifth inning. Tyran Dorrance drive home a run with a long triple in the bottom of that inning, and Jake Smolinski also helped with an RBI single. Smolinski went 2-for-4 with two runs and two RBI in the game.
“If we wouldn’t have made a couple of errors earlier in the game we wouldn’t have given them a couple of extra runs,” Twins assistant coach Kent Phillips said. “It’s a totally different ballgame.”
Their fielding in that inning hurt as much as what they did at the plate in some cases Saturday.
“We need to be a little bit more consistent at the plate, a little bit smarter,” said Phillips. “Plate discipline is a big ting. We’ve got too many guys swinging at stuff out of the zone and it puts us in a hole and then strike three goes by and it’s right in the middle of the plate. We had too many caught looking again (Saturday) that we need to really step up on.”
In Saturday’s first game, the Twins weren’t able to get on the board until the bottom of the sixth inning, when they’d already gone down seven runs. Jose Reyes and Aiden Krafchuk had RBI singles in that inning. Both had gone 2-for-4 at the plate in the game to account for four of the Twins’ hits in the game.
Thursday, the Twins had to try to come back on the Wolfpack after the entered the top of the seventh 9-4. After an error brought home a couple of runs when Rhett Krafchuk hit a ball in the infield, a Burke Lyons RBI single drove home another two-out run.
Now that they’re in midget AA provincials, they won’t be familiar with any of the teams there this year with the exception of the Pirates.
“I think realistically being that we are a young team and make a few more mistakes than some of the higher AAA teams don’t make, skill-wise it’s probably the place where we belong,” said Phillips.
Their pool at provincials includes the Weyburn Beavers, the Parkland (Yorkton) Expos and the Regina Blue Jays. They start Friday afternoon and the semifinals are on Sunday.
