Edina’s most improbable American Legion baseball victory of the year July 19 put the Hornets in position for a first- or second-place seed in the Sub-State 3 Tournament.
Trailing the Wayzata Wizards 6-0 by the middle of the second inning, Edina’s hopes for victory looked bleak, and by the fourth inning Wayzata led 12-3 with a chance to end the contest via the 10-run rule.
But Edina wasn’t finished. The Hornets scored seven runs in the bottom of the fifth to make the score 12-10.
The game was tied 12-12 when Charles Gearen of Wayzata hit a home run in the top of the eighth to give the Wizards a one-run advantage. But in the bottom of the seventh, Edina used four straight hits to win the game 14-13. Jack McCoy’s fourth hit of the game scored pinch runner Quinlan Cronin with the winning run. Cronin slid in head-first to beat the tag by Wayzata catcher Tyler Esposito.
The hits in the bottom of the eighth gave Edina relief pitcher Charlie Moore the victory. He was on the mound for 6 1/3 innings, following Wyatt Pacyna and Henry Duray.
Excited about the victory that gave Edina a 9-4 season record, Moore said, “We were due.”
Edina left fielder Michael Simonson, who matched McCoy with four hits in the game, said, “We finally beat Wayzata this year [after four losses during the high school season]. I can’t remember playing in another game like this one.”
Simonson opened the bottom of the eighth by banging a double off the 355-foot sign in dead center field. Catcher Joe Berghult looped a single into short right field to put the potential winning run on base. “I was looking for an outside pitch,” he said. “I wanted to advance the tying run to third base.”
George McIntyre hit a single to left and that set the stage for McCoy to deliver the game-ending hit.
“I was looking for a pitch I could put in play,” McCoy said. “We didn’t have a lot of motivation early in the game, but we finished strong.”
Wayzata left Braemar Park knowing a victory had slipped away.
For Edina, the outcome refreshed a belief that the Hornets are never out of a game. Eight players in Edina’s nine-man lineup had hits in Friday night’s game - McCoy and Simonson with four each, McIntyre and Charlie Pankratz with two each and Berghult, Joe Spades, Charlie Strodl and Kai Shane with one each.
Edina won another one-run game July 17 at Waconia with a final score of 6-5. Jack Emerson pitched 5 2/3 innings for the win and Quinn Cronin pitched a scoreless 1 1/3 innings to finish up. Simonson, McIntyre, Ben Molitor and Reid LaFrenz led Edina with two hits each. Other hits were by Berghult, Pankratz and Cullen Bjerke.
Sub-State 3
Several changes in sub-state alignments left American Legion baseball teams in Sub-State 3 with a one in six chance of making it to the State Division I Tournament.
Chaska announced that it was dropping out of the playoffs and Bloomington 1 was moved into a different sub-state by the state Legion tournament committee, leaving only six in Sub-State 3: The host team from Shakopee, plus Chanhassen, Edina, Hopkins, Hutchinson and Waconia. None of those six teams made it to state in 2023. Hopkins and Edina both went to state in 2022.
The sub-state tournament began earlier this week at Schleper Field in Shakopee and runs through Saturday, July 27. Only the winner advances to state.
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