Opportunities abounded for New Canaan throughout Tuesday's Class L baseball semifinal against Farmington. Unfortunately for the Rams, clutch hits did not. The 13th-seeded Rams fell, 2-1, to the 21st-seeded Indians at Nolan Field in Ansonia.
Farmington (17-7) advances to the championship game Friday or Saturday. New Canaan (16-9), which has never won a state baseball title, will look back and relive the innings in which it left the bases loaded twice. The Rams stranded 13 runners in all.
"That's the story,'' New Canaan coach Mitch Hoffman said. "We've been getting those runners in most of the year. You have to put the ball in play and put pressure on the defense. We didn't do it."
New Canaan set the tone for the game in the first inning. The Rams loaded the bases with two outs. One run scored when Willie Karl got hit by a pitch. That was all the Rams could muster, however, off Farmington starter David Kerlejza.
The Rams also had the bases loaded in the fifth with one out after a single by Willie Burger and walks to Karl and Doug Reilly. But Kerlejza got out of the inning with two strikeouts. New Canaan went down fighting in the seventh, getting a leadoff single from Alex Farina and a two-out single from Reilly. Farmington's John Arcidiacono got the final out on Chris Laird's hard one-hopper to short.
"The ones that hurt are runners on third bases and less than two out,'' Hoffman said. "You have to do something with that. You have to do the little things at this caliber of competition. If we do, we win this game."
Peter Meadows took the loss. Farmington tagged him for five hits in the fourth, including four consecutive hard-hit doubles. The Indians ran into trouble with their aggressiveness, as two runners were gunned down at third base.
Farina relieved Meadows in the sixth and had four strikeouts in two innings. The Rams couldn't capitalize, however, and fell a game short of playing for the state title.
New Canaan can take pride knowing it was the last team from the Fairfield County Interscholastic Athletic Conference still playing. It also reached the state semifinals, the first time in a long time that has happened. The underpinnings are in place with a solid group of underclassmen that should result in more state tournament trips.
"I think everybody would say we had a good season, and that we were playing with house money by getting to the state semifinals,'' Hoffman said. "You still want to win it all. I think we're as good as any anybody around."
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