Southern Brother's baseball team wins Regional Tournament; going to JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, CO

CONGRATULATIONS to TEMPLE COLLEGE on a well earned tournament victory!


Update
Temple Daily Telegram: Diamond Kings

Temple Head Coach Craig McMurtry:
"This is the sweetest win we've had since our program started."

Waco Tribune Herald: MCC Baseball Denied Title in 13th

The Tribune-Herald notes that these teams split their first 6 games this season. Their 7th and final game required 13 innings to be decided.


An email I sent to Bro64:

Hooray! Fantastic series of baseball games: Temple clawed - and I mean clawed - their way through the losers bracket to the tourney championship -- close game after close game. Yesterday's second game - which also was Temple's second game against MCC, ended 10-9. All fans were exhausted from a final hour of tense baseball: scoring threats and heartbreak occurring for both sides; the game seeming to be fully in the balance every minute for an hour. It was tense.

So, today's final game - a rematch third game against MCC in this tourney - couldn't possibly match yesterday. Would likely be a comfortable victory for someone, right? Wrong. Instead: game won by Temple on a solo HR in the bottom of the 13th inning.

Temple's CF, Korey Wacker, is a LH from Harker Heights, which is lightly plopped in between Killeen and Temple. Wacker is listed at 5'9" and 145 lbs - and you get the feeling that listing is exaggerated to make him seem bigger. He played every day in this tourney. CF is a lot of running; our weather is hot and humid. He ran the bases every game - including stolen bases, including beating the MCC pitcher to 1B on a key ground ball infield single in today's game. He played a double header yesterday, and all day today. When, after fighting through the loser's bracket, Temple had used up their top 7 pitchers ---- at that point, just as in little league, the tiny CF trotted in to pitch the 12th inning. You have to savor the scene: it's the last day of the tourney; it's extra innings - one team is about to go to the World Series and one team is about to disband forever; it's a hot and humid 12th inning; Wacker is as tiny skinny as a blade of grass, is dirty dusty sweat-stained, and is trotting in nonchalantly from deep CF so he can climb up onto the pitchers mound. It was a moment.

MCC had a runner on 1B and no one out. Wacker, throwing from well below a 3/4 arm slot, had one good pitch: a sinking, fading change-up. Everything else he had was not a lot. Wacker was a tinier and skinnier Jamie Moyer, only without the good curve and without the pin point control. He just had the change-up, and somehow he rode it for two innings: miraculously stymieing aluminum bat wielding college baseball hitters who had played an 80 game college season just to get their timing down so they could crush this will-o-the-wisp poor man's Jamie Moyer. Yet: throwing the dancing change-up is apparently the way they teach pitching in the baseball hotbed of Harker Heights, TX. Wacker kept chucking it: sidearm slow dancing it in there with a fade-away finish. He gave up two fly balls to the warning track - once with runners on base. Somehow, nothing went out, everything got caught by OFs, MCC didn't score, and Temple got the solo HR in the bottom of the 13th. Pandemonium. A baseball miracle.