By Dan Weber NKyTribune sports reporter
They have played three times this season. Each team has scored 10 runs against the other. The last two games finished up on the final at-bat in the last inning with two outs.
Ryle and Covington Catholic could not be closer. Not in this regional semifinal Wednesday. Not anywhere, not anytime.
“Not if we played 10 times,” Ryle Coach Joseph Aylor said as he walked off the Thomas More Stadium turf with the Raiders’ fans’ cheers still ringing in his ears.
“I was thinking win or lose, this was going to be one of our finer moments,” Aylor said of these two teams with 30 or more wins – the only region that can say that – battled each other one final time.
With the no-longer-No. 2 Raiders, now 30-9, coming from behind for the second straight time against the top-ranked Colonels (31-6) to win in walk-off fashion.
But it wasn’t easy, down 4-0 after four innings against a team that had allowed Ryle an average of two runs a game this year, the Raiders – and their large, loud group of fans from right down US 42 – didn’t pack it in.
“I knew we were going to win,” said junior catcher Josh Caudill, whose perfectly placed fly ball down the right field line scored the game-winning run with two outs in the seventh for a 5-4 win.
“That’s the biggest crowd I’ve ever coached in front of,” Aylor said, “that was awesome.”
And heart-breaking. Across the field, a CovCath team packed its gear away for another year.
“These kids deserved better,” CovCath Coach Bill Krumpelbeck said of his devastated Colonels. “Our kids couldn’t have worked harder,” he said of the “four and five-hour workouts the last couple of weeks.”
It showed as CovCath jumped out with the game’s first four runs, twice hitting the ball to the center field wall – 4,740 inches away according to the sign there – with Jackson Reardon and Vince DiTommaso doing the honors with triples.
And while the offense was firing away, left-hander Bradley Zekl, Kentucky’s winningest pitcher at 10-0, was holding Ryle’s hitters at bay with his soft stuff, changing speeds and pinpoint location, allowing just a single run and five hits in his five-inning start.
But that was as far as he would go. “He (Zekl) pitched a helluva game,” Krumpelbeck said as he brought on hard-throwing closer Charlie Dieruf in the sixth. “That was the plan from the get-go,” he said.
But the plan went sideways on two-out, two-on RBI doubles from Ryle closer Caleb Mann and CovCath-killer Tate Cordrey, who hit the two-run walk-off home run two weeks ago against the Colonels. The inning before, super-frosh AJ Curry, Kentucky’s leading hitter at .581, knocked in Ryle’s first run with his second hit, a double.
Although Cordrey’s hit was not without controversy as a two-strike curve ball to Cordrey could have been the inning-ending third out with the score 4-2 but was called a ball as the CovCath dugout collapsed onto the turf at the call.
“You saw what happened,” Krumpelbeck, “I just can’t comment on the umps.”
“That curve ball was close,” Cordrey said, “but I was waiting for the fast ball.” On the next pitch, he got one, lofting a perfectly placed gapper that scored two and tied it up at 4-4. “I love being in that spot.”
“I’ve never seen a team with this much fight,” Aylor said.
But it wasn’t just his team that made plays. “Reardon made a helluva play and then Suwinski made a helluve play,” Aylor said as one Colonel infielder flagged the ball down deep in the hole or down the line back-handed.
“It was 4-0 but we thought it could be 1-1,” Aylor said. The Raiders, he said, knew they were still in it, even down 4-0.
And now, thanks to Dixie Heights’ win, a team the Raiders split with, they’ll play the championship game Saturday morning at 11, which will give the eight Ryle seniors four hours before their own 3 pm graduation at NKU that day.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a distraction,” Aylor said for his team that has now won 17 of its last 19 games.
Krumpelbeck, the third-winningest all-time Kentucky high school baseball coach with 1,128 wins, said wins weren’t the issue for him or his program. “I’ve had a lot of tough losses,” he said. “And I’ve never cared about the wins. What we talk about is winning championships and going downstate.”
But only one of these two will be able to do that. Not the team that scored the first four runs but the one that scored the final five.
SCORING SUMMARY
COVCATH 1 2 0 1 0 0 0 – 4 6 1
RYLE 0 0 0 0 1 3 1 – 5 10 2
WP: Mann 7-1 LP: Dieruf 1-2
LEADING HITTERS: CovCath: Reardon 2-3, triple; DiTommaso 2-2, triple. Ryle: Curry 2-4, double, RBI; Caudill 2-4, RBI; Morris 2-3; Mann double, RBI; Cordrey double, 2 RBI.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.