PHOENIX – Over the course of this season, Ironwood Ridge baseball coach Dennis Toia had grown accustomed to watching his team pull off late-inning rallies, with the Nighthawks developing a penchant for scrappy at-bats and frequent two-out magic.
Toia was hoping that script wouldn’t flip this late in the state tournament, but throughout Thursday’s Division II semifinal matchup against Phoenix Greenway, it was Ironwood Ridge’s bats going cold with Greenway instead coming through in the clutch.
No. 10 Ironwood Ridge fell 5-2 to No. 5 Greenway at Maryvale Baseball Park, stranding 10 baserunners in seven innings while Greenway landed the decisive offensive strike by scoring four runs with two outs in the bottom of the third.
“That’s what we normally do. We get two-out hits,” Toia said. “They strung about four two-out hits in a row and we couldn’t get any. That’s the way it goes.”
Ironwood Ridge (23-8-2) drops to the elimination bracket to play No. 9 Tucson High on Saturday. The winner of that game will advance to Tuesday's Division II championship game against Greenway at Tempe Diablo Stadium.
Ironwood Ridge, looking for the program’s first state finals appearance, started strong Thursday, stoking senior right-hander Nick Estrella to a 2-0 lead after the top of the first inning.
Estrella, who went the distance in the Nighthawks’ 4-2 quarterfinal win over Mesa Westwood on Saturday, gave a run back in the bottom of the first and ran into trouble again in the third, putting two runners on base with two outs.
After a battle with Estrella, Justin Freeman doubled to plate both runs and give Greenway a 3-2 lead, and a walk and pair of singles led to two insurance runs crossing the plate in the inning.
“I told our guys before the game that we might only have one shot to get some runs,” Greenway coach Matt Denny said. “(Estrella) is a really good pitcher, and I knew we were going to have our work cut out for us. He’s a really competitive kid. He believes in himself and really does a good job commanding the zone. We squandered a couple opportunities during the game, but we did enough during that one inning to get it done.”
Ironwood Ridge was unable to do anything but squander its own opportunities the rest of the game, watching its best chance evaporate in the top of the fifth when senior right-fielder Gavin Ortiz lined out to second to end the inning with the bases loaded.
With the loss on the ledger, Ironwood Ridge no longer has the safety net of double elimination, but Toia is hopeful his team’s clutch hitting will return by the weekend.
“Everything we want is still right in front of us,” he said. “We’ll get after it Saturday and then see what happens.”
