Cascade comes out on wrong end of chaotic finish

DES MOINES - They accomplished a lot. More than any other team in school history. That's saying something considering the baseball-crazy community they represent.

But you got the nagging feeling the Cascade Cougars felt like maybe they underachieved this week at the state tournament. That's whether they'll admit it or not.

'This was something special,” Cascade's Derek Lieurance insisted, after his team's 5-3 loss to Waterloo Columbus in Thursday night's Class 2A semifinals at Principal Park. 'What we did has never been done before. For us seniors to go out like this ... we might not have won a state championship, but I feel like we're champions.”

The Cougars won 38 games, knocked off neighborhood nemesis Dyersville Beckman in a substate final, earned the top seed here and beat Mediapolis for their first state tourney win. But they came out on the wrong end of a crazy finish as their 20-game win streak went kaput.

Columbus (32-5) scored twice in the seventh inning for the go-ahead runs. The Sailors ended Cascade starting pitcher Trace Hoffman's incredible season-long scoreless string with three runs in the sixth, a rally spurred by a pair of errors.

The right-hander went his first 46 2/3 innings without giving up anything: no earned runs, no unearned runs. He got charged with five (all earned) in 6 2/3 innings to take the loss.

'Honestly, I felt my best in those later innings,” Hoffman said. 'I just couldn't get it done.”

Left for dead, Cascade tied the game at 3-3 with a pair of runs in the bottom of the sixth, scoring on a wild pitch and when Lieurance was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded. The Cougars were hit three times in the game and walked six times, but managed just three singles, one infield.

'We just couldn't seem to stop the bleeding a little bit,” said Coach Roamn Hummel. 'We'd stop them, needed to score a run to put them away, and we didn't do that. We'd get guys on base and have opportunities to do that stuff. In the end, I just felt like we swung at pitches late in counts we shouldn't have ... It was just not what we'd done all year long.”

'That was just a rollercoaster,” said Columbus' Henry Dropps, whose RBI single through the right side turned out to be the winner. 'At one point, you're on top of the world. You're thinking ‘We've got this, we've just got to play good defense.' But you can't fold under pressure. They got those runs, but you've got to get them back. We've done it before, we might as well do it again.”

Columbus brought in ace Luke Farley to pitch the seventh, and he got Cascade 1-2-3, including back-to-back strikeouts to end it.

'We just kept going back and forth,” Hoffman said. 'Unfortunately, the last thing went their way, so that's how the game ended.”

'What you do to lose a game, we did it,” Hummel said.

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