Baseball playoffs!! Jaguars advance to finals

A tense, high-stakes playoff game played out at Marthaler Chevy baseball stadium on the campus of Minnewaska Area high school tonight. Two teams in Section 6A duked it out in the tournament's winner's bracket final. The B-B-E Jaguars baseball team was playing in the Section 6A semifinals for the second year in a row.

*Below, footage from the bottom of the first inning. It begins with Evan Wiener hitting an RBI-single to score Jackson Peter from third base.


Final score: B-B-E 4, New York Mills 2. Senior Payton VanBeck pitched another complete game playoff win. It was incredible. He now has a 6-1 record for the season.

After New York Mills tied the game at 1-1 in the top of the third inning, two scoreless frames played out. The Jaguars pulled ahead 4-1 with a three-spot sixth inning. The Eagles got just one run back in their final at bat, and the Jaguars ultimately out-hit New York Mills by a 9 to two margin.

*Below, video featuring the final minutes of the top of the seventh inning, with B-B-E coming out on top after pitcher Payton VanBeck fielded an infield hit ball and gently tossed it to first base for the final put out.

B-B-E, 13-9 overall, is now in the section championship series for the first time in our 30-year school history!

• The Section 6A championship series begins with a game at 1:30 p.m. on Friday June 7 at Minnewaska Area high school. If our B-B-E Jaguars baseball team wins that game, they are in the state tournament! If the second game is necessary to decide it, that game will be played on Saturday at a time TBD. The Jaguars will take on either New York Mills (16-4) or Parkers Prairie (13-11) in that Friday afternoon game. Earlier in the day, those two teams will play in the elimination bracket final. The loser is out, and the winner moves on.

In the earlier Section 6A elimination games at Minnewaska, Parkers Prairie defeated Border West 3-0 to take out a No. 1 seed from the tournament. In the other elimination game, Upsala/Swanville Area won 5-1 over Brandon-Evansville in a game between No. 3-seeded teams.

In Section 5AA, Maple Lake's baseball team lost in the section championship series. They lost 5-4 to Holy Family Catholic tonight. They would have needed to defeated the Fire twice to advance to state.

• I want to give a quick shout out to anyone who is reading this for this thing we call "History"! Right now we can honor and celebrate the 75-year anniversary of D-Day and the sacrifices our country endured during World War II. Parents, please talk to your kids about history. You are the first teacher in their lives, and history matters! It's especially easy for kids to learn history today if they are steered to the right sources.

Here's a snippet off of Wikipedia about D-Day and the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944: The Normandy landings were the landing operations on Tuesday, 6 June 1944 of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. Codenamed Operation Neptune and often referred to as D-Day, it was the largest seaborne invasion in history. The operation began the liberation of German-occupied France (and later western Europe) from Nazi control, and laid the foundations of the Allied victory on the Western Front.

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