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Upset halts Dawgs' title prospects

The Dawg days of summer came to an abrupt halt.

The Dawg days of summer came to an abrupt halt.

The Okotoks Dawgs — who finished with the best record in the regular season in the Western Major Baseball League — were stunned by the Edmonton Prospects when they eliminated Okotoks in the first-round of the playoffs last week.

“We had a young team, but we felt we had a very good team — we spent a lot of time going over fundamentals to get better and through the season we got better,” said Prospects coach Ray Brown. “We were losing games because we made mistakes. Against Okotoks we stopped making the mistakes.”

The Prospects’ 22-25 record put them 11 games behind the 33-14 Dawgs after the regular season. Edmonton had lost seven of eight meetings to the Dawgs prior to the playoffs.

A stat that was meaningless after the Prospects’ 10-5 victory Aug. 3 in Edmonton to take the series 3-1.

“We felt we could play with the Dawgs, we knew that if we could play good clean baseball we could win,” said Brown, who coached with the Dawgs Academy in 2007.

It was the first time the Prospects have won a WMBL playoff round.

Edmonton had won the first two games of the series in Okotoks on July 31-Aug. 1.

There was still some fight in the Dawgs.

Okotoks won Game 3 by doubling up the Prospects 6-3 Aug. 2 in the Capital City.

Dawgs righty Liam Stroud had his best game of the year in allowing only three hits and one earned run over seven innings in the win.

Dawgs outfielder Elliott Cary, who played his best baseball of the year in the playoffs, went four for five in the victory with a solo blast.

The Floridian who attends Oregon State University, said the Dawgs never stopped believing in themselves.

“We had a strong positive mindset going into the game (Game 3), we liked our chances going into Edmonton,” said Cary, who hit .471 in the playoffs with a pair of homers. “We knew that if we can win two there, we would be back home where it would be a tough place for them… But they were on a roll coming into the series and they kept it going.”

Okotoks jumped out to a 1-0 lead in what turned out to be the deciding Game 4 when Cary drove in Tyler Mildenberg in the top of the third.

The two teams were tied at 2-2 after 4 innings when the Prospects struck gold.

They would score three in the bottom of the fifth and another five Prospects would cross the plate in the sixth to take an insurmountable 10-2 lead. Okotoks would score two in the eighth and one in the ninth to make the final 10-5. Okotoks starter Nick Vickers, a J Dawg Academy grad, took the loss.

Cary said the Dawgs were missing some key players in Daniel Fredrickson, infielder JT Patterson and others, but that’s not the reason for the surprising outcome.

“We were down a few guys, but that’s no excuse, we still had a great team we put on the field,” Cary said. “They just outplayed us.”

Dawgs manager Tyler Graham said his players have nothing to hang their heads about.

“They played hard all season – we got off to a slow start and we were able to battle back to finish with the best record in the league — I’m proud of them,” he said.

Graham said the team was hurt by the loss of Fredrickson, Patterson, as well as pitcher Sammy Wong and infielder/outfielder Justin King.

The Dawgs powerful slugger Kellen Marruffo, who finished the regular season with six home runs, was hampered by a pulled hamstring. He hit .333, but hit more Ichiro-like singles than long blasts.

The Prospects are giving the Medicine Hat Mavericks all they can handle. The Western division final is tied at 2-2 with the final game being played Aug. 10 after the Aug. 9 game was rained out. The winner will play the Swift Current Indians for the league final. To keep track of the WMBL finals go to wmbl.ca

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