La Chai earns playoff berth over Bring It On

Team La Chai brought their beating sticks with them to the ballpark on Thursday when they dismantled Bring It On by a 25-7 score in a pre-postseason tiebreaker for the Island Wide Slow Pitch Softball League at the Oleai Sports Complex.

The game determined the eighth and final playoff spot for the slow pitch competition, which still has a bevy of make-up games and matches for playoff positioning left in the coming weeks.

La Chai and Bring It On finished their seasons all knotted up in a tie for the last seed in the playoffs with identical records of 6-7, but it was the powerful La Chai team that emerged with the victory in an abbreviated contest that invoked the 10-run mercy rule.

La Chai scored 25 runs off of 21 hits in four innings of work, including a pair of homeruns from pitcher John Reyes. They got the ball rolling in the bottom of the first inning, when they answered the run scored by Bring It On with an eight run rally that scored the first eight hitters in the lineup.

Bring It On scored another run in the top of the second to make the score 8-2, but La Chai rallied for six in the bottom half of the inning to separate the two again. La Chai failed to answer the four-run third inning of B.I.O., but they unleashed a wave of 11 runs in the bottom of the fourth inning to secure their seat at the postseason table.

Reyes finished the night atop the mound allowing seven runs off of 10 hits in five innings of action, while hitting 3-for-4 with five runs batted in at the plate.

In a night that featured the rare occurrence of both slow and fast pitch games, the Verizon Sluggers surrendered 26 runs in seven innings to the D-9ers to fall to the second place powerhouse.

After trailing 1-0 after the top of the first inning, the D-9ers scored six runs off of six hits to take the lead and never looked back. D-9ers first baseman Tony Camacho went a solid 4-for-5 at the plate, and was a triple shy of hitting for the cycle. Camacho finished the night with five scores and four runs batted in, and a three-run homerun in the first inning.

Teammate Mel Sakisat also had a homerun on the night, but aside from scoring two tallies for the D-9ers, it gave him the regular season lead in the long-ball department with eight. Sakisat finished the night with a 4-for-6 performance at the plate that included a pair of doubles and a triple.

Centerfielder Roy Celis was also a single away from completing the cycle, as the consistent hitter went 4-for-5 with a homerun, two doubles, a triple, and four scores in the 26-18 victory.