Jake Hoagland made a sensational late-game catch in deep left field Monday to preserve Coupeville’s win over 2A Bremerton. (John Fisken photo)
Jake Hoagland walked on to the Coupeville High School baseball diamond Monday a mere mortal.
He sprinted off it a bonafide legend.
Running full-tilt, glove out, carrying the hopes and dreams of every fan in attendance, the CHS junior made a sensational catch along the line in deep left field, saving a game that the Wolves, somehow, against all reason, won.
It’s not easy for a small 1A school to beat a large 2A school like Bremerton, and the odds get even more remote when your team gets no-hit and the visitors load the bases not once, not twice, but four times — twice with no outs.
And yet, somewhere just past 6 PM Monday, in one of the most improbable wins ever seen on the prairie, Coupeville danced off with a 2-1 non-conference victory.
The second straight win for the Wolves, it lifts them to 2-2 on the season.
How they got there is a testament to guts, sheer will power, poise in the spotlight and a whole lot of luck.
In other words, the kind of story the Wolf faithful will still be talking about when these players return for their 20-year reunion.
It’s a tale of three pitchers who bent, but didn’t break.
A defense that came up with big plays, and then capped it with one of the greatest snags ever pulled off by a guy in a Coupeville uniform.
It’s Nick Etzell salsa dancing around the catcher, Joey Lippo running for home like a mad man and Kory Score using every inch of his towering frame not once, but twice, to pull off web gems that make a coach’s heart flip-flop in joy.
In the end, it’s the tale of a team that flat-out refused to lose, and, by doing so, made a dramatic statement to all their future foes.
We will find a way. We will always find a way.
The game started with the debut of an escape artist, as Coupeville hurler Dane Lucero loaded the bags in the top of the first before half of the fans had even settled into their seats.
Channeling the inner calmness shown so often in the past by former Wolf pitcher CJ Smith, Lucero didn’t seem to notice, or at least didn’t seem to acknowledge, the danger he was in.
Suddenly tossing BB’s, the Wolf sophomore whiffed back-to-back Knights, then got the #6 hitter to whack a soft liner towards the gap between second and first.
Coupeville’s second-baseman, Lippo, was coming hard from the left side, but first-baseman Score, easily Coupeville’s tallest infielder, reached up, up and away and speared the ball over his head to preserve the shutout.
Lippo immediately repaid his teammate by scoring the first run of the game in the bottom half of the inning.
After getting plunked by a wayward pitch, he went to second when Clay Reilly walked, then tore around third and plated himself on a fielder’s choice by Lucero.
Bremerton blunted any further rallying by catching Reilly a step off of third, but the damage was done, and Lucero had a run to work with.
And one run was all he would need.
Lucero had runners on in every inning, but denied Bremerton at every opportunity.
After stranding a runner at first in the second inning, he had runners at second and third in the third inning, but escaped by punching out a Knight hitter on a change-up, one of seven strikeouts he recorded on the afternoon.
Cue the fourth and cue the hint of trouble (again), as Bremerton used a pair of walks and two dropped balls, which allowed a strikeout victim to reach first, to juice the bags.
Stifling a small yawn, Lucero reared back, whiffed the next two hitters, then got a third to hit a towering can of corn that Lippo retreated under and snared in shallow right-center.
Desperate to pad its 1-0 lead, Coupeville came out aggressive in the bottom of the fourth, and it paid off.
After Lucero eked out a walk, Nick Etzell bolted from the bench to pinch-run and immediately went to work.
He stole second, threw off the Bremerton hurler enough that the Knight pitcher was called for a balk — sending Etzell to third — then skipped home on a sac fly off the bat of Matt Hilborn.
The throw came in hot, but pulled the catcher slightly to the left of the base-path, and an alert Etzell twisted his body into a pretzel to evade the tag, stamping home plate as he did so.
Boasting a 2-0 lead — still without an official hit in the book — Coupeville went from the low-key Lucero to the big, bad bull himself, Julian Welling, in the fifth.
Striding on to the field after missing some time with arm issues, the Wolf junior brought the heat, and continued Lucero’s balancing act.
Loading the bags, he got out of it by ramming the ball right down the ensuing batter’s throats, striking out two of the final three sluggers to keep Bremerton scoreless.
The Knights weren’t going to go down easily, however, as they again loaded the bases in the sixth, finally notching a run when Welling came a wee bit too inside and plunked a Bremerton hitter who, it could be argued, made very little effort to get out of the way.
With the visitor’s dugout suddenly rockin’, and Welling exiting after pointing at his elbow, CHS coach Marc Aparicio turned to Hilborn to close out a third game.
At that exact moment, deep in left field, Hoagland snapped to attention, pointed up at a twinkling light in the heavens above and silently mouthed, “I’m gonna be just like that, a bright, shining star.”
Hey, I was there! You weren’t! If I say it happened just that way, who are you to disagree?
The pitch left Hilborn’s arm, bat met ball and a towering fly that was descending dangerously fast went screaming into the great wide open.
Find pay-dirt, and the odds of that happening were tremendous, and two, possibly three runs score.
On a day when Coupeville couldn’t buy an official hit, that had doom written all over it.
Except a hero was being born, a legend being crafted with every stride, as Hoagland raced towards the rapidly-falling ball.
A half-muted wail started to rise from the bleachers, as every Wolf fan sucked in their breath and prayed to whomever or whatever they pray to, and then all the pent-up emotion came rushing out in one scream of pure, unadulterated joy as ball met glove and glove held on for dear life.
If Lucero is low-key, Hoagland ain’t far behind, but the power of his smile beaming across the prairie as he hustled in to get properly roughed-up by his joyous teammates told the tale.
Something deep inside Bremerton died at that moment, and it showed in the seventh, as Hilborn gunned them down one-two-three, perhaps while humming “Enter Sandman” to himself.
Two K’s, wrapped around Score stretching out to his full height (6’2 or so) to pull down a throw at first and the improbable, memorable celebration was on.
The reality is, dark skies, moderately cold weather and a threat of rain limited the crowd, but years from now, everyone in Coupeville will claim to have been there to see this game unfold.
And hey, in spirit they were.
Every time Lucero danced with the devil in the pale moonlight and escaped, every time Welling burnt a fastball into Taylor Consford’s catchers mitt, and, especially, in the moment Hoagland became a bright, shining star, every Wolf, past, present and future, was smiling down on that diamond.
One team, one town, one unbelievable win.
