Kurtis Stadnicki had no doubt. As soon as the ball left his bat, the Concord senior knew he resuscitated the Crimson Tide’s season.
Stadnicki hit a game-tying two-run homer in the bottom of the seventh and Griffin Gilbert drove home the game-winning run as No. 4 Concord walked off with a 6-5 win over No. 12 Nashua North on Saturday in the Division I baseball quarterfinals at Doane Diamond.
“If you don’t believe, you don’t give yourself a chance,” said Concord coach Scott Owen, his team set to face No. 1 Bedford in Wednesday’s semifinals at Holman Stadium. “And the kids obviously believed.”
The back-and-forth ballgame between the upstart Titans and the heavily favored Crimson Tide felt like three stages.
Fortunately for Concord, the third stage was the one that sent them to the semifinals, thanks to three Tide runs in the bottom of the seventh. Gilbert’s walk-off RBI single was the final dagger.
That bottom half frame started with North having won the second stage, up 5-3, with reliever and potential hero Varun Lingadal on the mound. However, he walked Concord’s Zach Miles on four pitches and then the next pitch gave up a moon shot over the center-field fence to Standicki, tying things at 5.
“When I hit it, I knew it was gone,” Standicki said. “When I went up I was trying to be aggressive and hit the first pitch.”
But stage three was not over. Enter Titans reliever Pat McCarthy, who plunked Jacob Knowles with his first toss. After an Eric Sullivan sacrifice bunt and Gilbert rope to right center, it was over.
“It happens,” North coach Zach Harris said. “The ball just flies around here, it always does.
“That’s baseball. Baseball’s a funny game. … The game can change, and it changed twice.”
Stage two: That belonged to the Titans, who were trailing 3-0 before they got five runs off Tide starter Jacob Knowles and reliever Sullivan. Trevor Kelly knocked in two runs with a single (but also got thrown out at the plate), Casey Lane tied it with an RBI groundout, but the big blow was a two-run home run to right off Sullivan by Lingadal.
“Varun pitched the best I’ve ever seen him pitch, and credit to him,” Harris said. “I told him, ‘We wouldn’t have been in this situation without you.’ ”
Stage one: Concord’s Ryan Tessier hit North starter Joe Berman’s first pitch for a leadoff home run in the bottom of the first, and the Tide got two more in the second on Alex Buteau’s sac fly and an RBI double by Zach Miles that chased Berman in favor of Lingadal.
Also, the Titans had the bases loaded in the second and came up empty, and had a run taken away in the third when the umpires ruled Kelly tagged up too early on a Will Brooks fly going to third (he reached home when the ball was dropped in the exchange).
Each team had 10 hits. Thus the Titans finish 10-12, but enjoyed their first tourney win in five years.
“We’re changing the culture here,” Harris said. “We start playing baseball like we played the last two games we’ve got a bright future.”
“They’re a tough team, they’re not going to give up,” Standicki said of the Titans. “But we believed we could win this game.”
Or for that matter – fortunately for the Tide – take two out of three.
(Monitor staff writer Jason Orfao contributed to this report.)