Stingers run falls short

Last season, the Concordia Stingers baseball team came within one game of winning the National Championship. This season they won’t get a chance to try again.
The Stingers lost the third game of their best-of-three Northern Conference final series against the Lafleche Dragons 9-0 at Pierre Elliot Trudeau park Sunday.
Concordia, who finished fourth in the conference, had to beat the top two teams in the conference in order to repeat as conference champions. After beating first place McGill last week, they couldn’t beat the second place Dragons.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said head coach Howard Schwartz. “I really thought we would come out today and do it. We played really well [Saturday]. We just didn’t follow our game plan in our at bats. We just didn’t have it today,” he said.
Concordia could only muster three hits off of Lafleche pitching and only got one runner to third base in the final inning when the game was all but over.
“Give them credit, they only gave up three hits,” said Schwartz. “But, we made him a much better pitcher because we didn’t take very good swings today and that’s what happens,” he said.
The game started off as a pitching duel as both teams were held scoreless through four innings. Concordia starter RJ Leibovitch didn’t give up a hit through four and a third innings, but gave up three runs and three hits in the fifth. The Stingers also committed two of their three errors in that inning.
In the sixth, Lafleche had another chance to score after the first two runners got on base. However, Concordia reliever Andrew Arpin forced the next two hitters into fielder’s choices and the final out came on a perfect relay to home plate to prevent a run.
The Stingers weren’t so lucky in the final inning. Concordia went through three pitchers in the inning as the Dragons sent 10 hitters to the plate and scored six runs to put the game out of reach. The biggest hit might have been the first run scoring play in the inning when Jordan Gilmour hit a double that scored two runs which made the score 5-0.
“What I’m thinking is that we can learn from this and figure out how strong we have to be when we get into situations like this next year because a lot of these guys will be back,” he said.
The Stingers forced a decisive game three at home on Sunday after splitting a double header in Trois-Rivi