For the third straight year, the Westlock Grey Lions are champions.
The team won its third consecutive Alberta West Central Baseball Association title with a 12-5 win over the Fort Saskatchewan Athletics on Aug. 26 in St. Albert.
The win came in Game Three of the best-of-three championship series. The teams had split the first two games — Westlock won 8-5 on Aug. 19, while Fort Saskatchewan returned the favour 3-1 on Aug. 21.
Westlock’s title-clinching win was not without its drama, as the Grey Lions broke the game open in the top of the eighth inning after the teams ended the regulation seven innings tied 5-5.
“We got a large number of runs in the eighth inning, but prior to that it was a nip-and-tuck game for sure,” said manager Rick Sereda.
In that eighth inning, the Grey Lions got the hits they needed, while the Athletics walked several batters and committed a few errors.
“The wheels kind of fell off the cart for them,” Sereda said. “We weren’t too sad to see that happen. We were happy to win.”
Westlock jumped out to a 3-0 lead through three innings, then watched Fort Saskatchewan tie things in the bottom of the third.
Fort Saskatchewan added two more in the bottom of the fourth to take a 5-3 lead. They held on to that lead until the top of the seventh when the Lions scored twice to tie things 5-5.
Then came the seven runs in the eighth.
Overall, Sereda said it was a good game for the Grey Lions.
“Our defence played really well for a bunch of old guys,” he said. “We didn’t commit one error in eight innings.”
The series win over the Athletics was a bit of redemption, as they had beat the Grey Lions in both regular season meetings, but Sereda didn’t quite see it that way.
“It’s a friendly rivalry between the two of us,” he said.
Even so, there were a wee bit of schadenfreude going through the Grey Lion clubhouse.
“It felt great; it would have felt great against anybody, especially to come back the way we did,” Sereda said.
The championship caps a season that saw the Grey Lions perform a bit below the standard they had set in the first two years of their reign.
They finished in third place in the regular season after a rough start that saw them need to recruit players on an ad hoc basis. But even those rough patches couldn’t stop them.
“Things game together really nicely in the last two weeks of the regular season and we rolled pretty nicely through the playoffs,” Sereda said.
Throughout the winter, he said the team’s task is to work on recruiting new, younger players to keep the squad competitive in 2015 and beyond.
“Our team is aging,” he said. “Father Time doesn’t slow down.”
