KEARNS — Ask any baseball purist whether it is better to have good hitting or good pitching, and good pitching will be the answer every time.
Kearns rode its hot bats to three consecutive wins to begin the American Legion Western Regional baseball tournament, but after its hot hitting cooled, so did its fortunes. The Cougars lost their last two games, including Monday night's championship against Tucson, Ariz., 13-3, in eight innings at Gates Field.
"This just kills me," said Cougars coach Dave Cline of losing the title contest on their home field. "Our hitting just went away. We scored four runs over our last 22 innings. We won't win many games that way. We didn't have a string like that all year."
The strength of Kearns was its hitting all season, and when it evaporated, the pitching simply wasn't strong enough. Starter Tyler Curtis did an admirable job for the first three innings, allowing only one run on a first-inning homer by David Romero, the first of his two solo shots on the night. But things fell apart.
Arizona led off the fourth inning with back-to-back singles before Nate Valdez delivered the game's biggest blow, hitting an opposite-field, three-run homer to right-center, giving Tucson a 4-0 lead. Chris Moon hit a two-run bomb three batters later, and with Kearns' struggles at the plate, the game was slipping away quickly with the Cougars trailing 7-0.
"I think our guys lost a little bit of confidence," said Cline. "I don't want to say they quit, because they didn't, but you could just kind of see they didn't quite have it."
TJ Carrington did give the team hope when he hit a two-run double in the fifth to cut the lead to five. Kearns could have seized control of the momentum and perhaps rallied all the way back in the sixth when it loaded the bases with nobody out. But the team was only able to push one run across in the potential game-changing opportunity. When Tucson scored four runs in the bottom of the inning, the remaining life was sucked from Kearns.
"I don't know what happened. This is just terrible. Terrible," said Carrington of the loss. "Their pitcher kept us off balance, but we just didn't hit the ball."
Even though Kearns narrowly missed out on advancing to the American Legion World Series, it is not hard for the coaches and players to look back on a great run.
"I am so proud of these guys," added Cline. "In 35 years of coaching, this is the best team I have ever been around."
Added Carrington: "This was a great group of guys, a great team. We had a great summer together and it was a lot of fun."
E-mail: mblack@desnews.com