Finally, the title series in the 2008 Budweiser Saipan Major League baseball tournament wrapped up with Rock Steady winning the deciding Game 5, 5-3, yesterday at the Francisco \u201cTan Ko\u201d Palacios Ballfield.<\/p>\n
Rock Steady had enough juice to survive SML\u2019s most stretched-out championship series, which took about three weeks to finish due to the rolling power outages.<\/p>\n
Winning pitcher and eventual Finals MVP Nick San Nicolas and Rock Steady\u2019s defense gave up only one run at the resumption of Game 5 to complete its domination of the 2008 season. Rock Steady was unbeaten in the regular season with a 14-0 record.<\/p>\n
Game 5 resumed at the top of the third inning with the Rangers leading at 2-1. But the Joeten Motors-sponsored squad failed to pick up where it left off, scoring only one run in the remaining six-and-a-half innings.<\/p>\n
Catcher Robert Bansil scored the Rangers\u2019 lone run yesterday on a Ben Benwachi single.<\/p>\n
Rock Steady made two runs apiece in the third and fourth inning to grab the driver\u2019s seat and hung on to the lead in the last four-and-half innings with its outfielders hustling out for the ball.<\/p>\n
Dane Lizama reached homeplate at the bottom of the third on a Jonathan Camacho sacrifice fly, while Roy Celis singled, driving Toi Celis home to put Rock Steady in the lead, 3-2.<\/p>\n
Rock Steady added two more runs in the fourth with Tyrone Omar and Eric Lizama scoring on Rangers errors.<\/p>\n
The Mel Tenorio-managed squad sealed the victory when Eric Lizama caught J.J. Laniyo\u2019s fly ball to rightfield at the top of the eighth.<\/p>\n
Dane Lizama went 4-for-4 at the plate, while Toi Celis and Omar hit 2-for-4 and 2-for-5, respectively.<\/p>\n
Rock Steady had a batting average of .351 after going 13-for-37. The Rangers had more trips at the plate, but went only 11-for-40 for a batting average of .275. <\/p>\n
San Nicolas pitched in no relief for Rock Steady, striking out five.<\/p>\n
Rock Steady coach Joey Dela Cruz said their defense brought them to the championship. He added that Rangers\u2019 errors allowed them to pull off a win.<\/p>\n
Rock Steady scored three of its runs on the Rangers passing and fielding miscues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finally, the title series in the 2008 Budweiser Saipan Major League baseball tournament wrapped up with Rock Steady winning the deciding Game 5, 5-3, yesterday at the Francisco \u201cTan Ko\u201d Palacios Ballfield.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125757\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}