Mac JBO Senior Federal team wins championship after loss of friend, teammate

Photo courtesy of Jessie Roberts##Mac’s Senior Federal JBO squad poses for a photograph with their title trophies in hand at West Albany High School. On top of the nearly three-foot tall championship trophy, individuals received smaller awards. The squad was also commended with individual and team sportsmanship honors.

Photo courtesy of Jessie Roberts##The jersey of Zakai Motley, a Patton Middle School eighth-grader and multi-sport athlete who passed away suddenly on Friday, Feb. 20, flutters in the wind while hanging in Mac’s dugout at West Albany. Motley’s No. 1, along with “Z” patches on their jerseys, stuck with the JBO team wherever they went.

Photo courtesy of Jessie Roberts##A dogpile commences on the back of the mound at West Albany moments after the final out of Mac’s championship victory.

Four months of impassioned play through physical adversity and tragedy ended with seven of the best games that McMinnville’s Senior Federal JBO baseball team competed in all year.

The talent from seventh and eighth grade that took the diamond under the leadership of Head Coach David Cunningham never quit on themselves, and it wasn’t easy.

Before the season began on April 11, the sudden passing of 13-year-old Zakai Motley left many athletes and families in McMinnville shocked. Motley was a friend to those on Mac’s JBO team, so they carried his spirit for the game through every inning they played.

“It was therapeutic in a way for these guys to stay together, stay active and be part of a team to help them emotionally get through something that you can never plan for,” Cunningham said.

The moment made parents and players alike put baseball into perspective, but Mac’s athletes never wavered in their commitment to the diamond.

After going 32-7 on the year, the Grizzlies entered the Senior Federal State Championship with unparalleled determination.

The tournament began on Friday, July 10, at West Albany High School. Mac was tasked with facing Oregon City, a team they’d split their two-game regular-season series with. The game was scoreless until the fourth, when Mac struck first with one run on heads-up base running by Blake Cunningham.

Mac tallied another run in the fifth, but Oregon City clawed back with a three-run seventh to walk off the Bears.

In the double-elimination bracket, Mac immediately had its back to the wall and would have to win six games in a row over three days to have any chance at a championship.

Cunningham has coached the current cohort since they were in third grade. When much of his team was in sixth grade, they won the junior championship. The team had faced adversity before, but the reiteration of a key message helped Mac fight back when they needed.

“I’ve always told them that it’s going to take the entire team to contribute in some shape, size or form, and the kids played amazing,” Cunningham said.

Following the morning loss to Oregon City, Mac responded on Friday afternoon by clobbering host West Albany, 19-1, in the first round of the elimination bracket.

An 11-run second inning, spearheaded by a pair of RBI base hits from Dylan Walters, helped Mac jump ahead. Walters was 2-for-2 in the inning, smacking a single and a double while plating a pair of runs. He was joined on the multi-hit train by Liam Batey (3-for-3, 2R, 2RBIs) and Kempton Roberts (2-for-3, 3R, 2RBIs).

Blake Cunningham led the team with three RBIs in the victory while going 1-for-2 with a double and two runs scored.

On the mound, Hayden Kuehn, Colton Roberts, Kempton Roberts, and Walters combined to allow just three hits and one run over five innings of the run-rule-shortened affair.

Mac returned to West Albany on Saturday and first played against Lebanon as the road squad.

A four-run second inning and a three-run third helped alleviate some pressure, giving the young Bears a 7-1 cushion through the later innings.

Lebanon threatened to rally with four runs in the fifth, pushing Mac’s starting pitcher, Brayden Woodward, out after 4 2/3 innings. Luckily, scores in the fourth, fifth and seventh kept Mac alive with a 10-7 win.

To keep playing into Sunday, Mac was rematched with Oregon City, who had lost to Grant Friday afternoon.

The game was tight from the start.

Again, as the road team, Mac opened the scoring with two runs in the first inning. Batey and Cunningham were the ones to cross the plate on throwing errors after leading off the game with back-to-back knocks.

Oregon City retorted with one run of its own in the bottom half. Later, in the top of the third, a Bryson Burdick base hit plated Brenton Symons for a 3-1 lead, but Oregon City responded to make it 3-2 at their next turn at bat. With a three-run fourth, the future Pioneers then jumped ahead 5-3.

Unfazed, Mac tied the game in the top of the fifth. Symons first doubled to score a run, plating Kuehn after a two-bagger of his own. Two batters later, with Burdick at the plate, Symons evened the score on a wild pitch.

“They kept overcoming failures and learned to move past the negative and stay in a positive mindset,” Cunningham said. “What they went through in life puts baseball into a little better perspective, and they kept responding to adversity throughout the season and the weekend.”

While Kuehn pitched 3 2/3 scoreless frames to end the game in relief of Blake Cunningham, the Mac offense continued to find barrels as they scored twice more in the sixth and seventh innings. As a team, they out-hit Oregon City 14-5 and were led by a four-hit performance from Batey for a 9-5 victory.

Sunday marked Mac’s toughest day yet.

To be crowned champions, they would have to win three games in less than 24 hours while being nearly depleted of pitching against Newberg and Grant.

At 10:30 a.m., Mac and Newberg got underway for their fifth meeting of the season. Mac took the first matchup, 7-5, on May 10, but Newberg was the victor in each of the following three contests by scores of 7-3, 3-2 and 12-5.

“Over the last four years, we’ve had some really competitive battles (with Newberg) … most of those games could’ve gone either way, but something I learned a long time ago was that you play against the game and not the opponent,” Cunningham said, invoking the lessons he learned while a player and coach at Linfield University in the early 2000’s.

“Every game, you’re going to play against a different opponent, but you still need to get 21 outs. You still need to score more runs and get on base, and that’s something that I’ve been empowering onto these guys since third grade.”

Mac treated Newberg with no remorse, banging out five runs in the top of the second inning to take an early lead. Newberg scored two in their half, but Mac responded with three more in the third.

In the fourth, a Batey double and Blake Cunningham single set the table for more damage. Five more scored, giving Mac a 13-2 lead.

Through the first four innings, Eddie Wilson and Blake Cunningham held the Tigers down.

Wilson completed three frames while allowing three hits and one earned run before Cunningham took over. Newberg was able to make a comeback off tired arms in the late innings, scoring four in the fifth, one in the sixth and four more in the seventh.

It was a grand slam from Newberg’s Feiffer Stone that kept the game alive in the final frame, but Colton Roberts was able to record the final two outs in relief to send Mac to the title series versus Grant.

JBO rules on pitching are strict to protect players’ arms, and by Mac’s final set of games, Cunningham was playing Tetris to piece the innings together.

No pitcher can throw more than 95 pitches in a day and 125 in a tournament. On no days’ rest, a pitcher’s limit is 50; on one day, it bumps up to 80, and on two days’ rest a pitcher is allowed 81-plus.

What made Cunningham’s team multifaceted is that nearly every player could take the bump, alleviating some stress, but still creating a challenge for Mac’s skipper.

“You really gotta thread the needle for managing the pitching side of it,” Cunningham said. “If you’re able to shorten the game by scoring 10, that definitely helps. We also played pretty good defense and stole some outs on the bases, which also minimizes pitch counts.”

In game one versus the yet-to-be-defeated Grant, Mac helped their cause with a strong example of the former from Cunningham.

The Bears scored six in their first turn at bat. A Tanner Rauch single scored Batey, who led off with a base hit, for the first run. From there, the merry-go-round commenced with a two-RBI double from Walters and a run-scoring single from Kuehn leading the charge.

Grant scored two of their own in the bottom of the first, but Mac struck back for one with a Rauch double.

Together, Batey and Rauch were 5-for-6 in the game with three RBIs and a trio of runs scored.

The middle of the lineup followed suit, as Woodward, Walters and Kuehn went 4-for-6 with six runs scored and four RBIs while propelling Mac to a 14-3 run-rule victory by helping to plate five in the fifth.

Colton Roberts was the starting pitcher and threw to all but one batter, which Batey retired with a strikeout to end the game.

The win finally meant there was a level playing field, and it was the team with the most offense left in the tank that claimed the championship.

While each squad sent five pitchers to the mound, neither set of bats slowed down in the win-or-go-home affair.

After four innings, the game was tied 10-10.

Blake Cunningham and Batey had done enough on the mound to stifle Grant, but the Generals touched Walters and Kempton Roberts for seven runs each. Luckily, the floodgates on Mac’s bats opened when they were most needed.

Fifteen batters went to the plate in the top of the fifth, six reached with hits, five walked and one was hit by a pitch. The result was 12 runs and a 22-10 lead.

Mac tallied four more over the last two innings to stave off 10 more runs from Grant, resulting in a 26-20 victory for the Grizzlies to be crowned JBO Senior Federal State Champions.

In addition to their trophy, Mac was given the Team Sportsmanship Award, while Rauch was honored with the Individual Sportsmanship Award.

In the aftermath, Cunningham believed their 45 innings of baseball over three days were the perfect example of who his players became as people and athletes.

“These kids never stopped believing in each other and never stopped fighting,” he said. “They were just finding a way to overcome any adversity that was put in their way, and it was a storybook ending to how those kids rallied around their buddy that was no longer with us.”