American summer ends

American’s Little League All-Stars summer season came to an end Wednesday night with a 7-1 elimination loss to Napa in the Northern California 12s tournament at Lions Town & Country Park. After capturing the District 52 and Section 3 banners, and winning their first two games in the Nor Cal tournament, American fell on back-to-back days to see their hopes of advancing to the coveted West Regionals stage dashed.

“It is what it is,” San Mateo American manager Jason Gordon said. “Sometimes you’ve just got to accept that it wasn’t meant to be. As much as we wanted this and thought about this for three years, only one team gets to make it, and it’s not going to be us.”

Gordon and his coaching staff of John Stone and Dan Workman held a long postgame huddle in left field with the team on a sweltering night in Madera. One of the points they drove home was that American had seven hits taken away from them by a remarkable performance from Napa’s defense.

The most gut-wrenching was the final play of the night, when Napa shortstop Brix Leach fielded a high one-hopper off Moreno’s bat — on as hard of an infield grounder you’ll ever see a 12-year-old hit — and flip it to second base to start the game-ending double play.

“It was a great play,” Moreno said. “It was a hard-hit ball. I thought it was going to bounce off him or something, but he made a great play.”

American was facing a tall hill to climb long before falling behind 6-0 after three innings of play, including Napa’s big five-run rally in the third. The boys from San Mateo were without two of their top pitchers, O’Brien and Moreno, who were unavailable to due reaching their pitch-count limits in previous games in the tourney.

In Wednesday’s must-win elimination game, American turned to right-hander Hudson Wong, who was making his first start of the All-Stars summer season. Wong kept Napa guessing with a good feel for his big breaking ball through the first two innings.

But in the third, Napa sent 10 batters to the plate, forcing American to turn to right-hander Matthew Ward, who American was hoping to keep on ice for a potential trip to the championship round Thursday.

“We were trying to save Matthew to give ourselves a chance [Thursday],” Jason Gordon said. “Probably if we start him (Wednesday) maybe it’s a different story, but we really wanted to ... give him a chance to get to pitch in the championship game.”

After Lucas Wedding got Napa on the board with an RBI single in the second, No. 12 hitter James Duhig had a clutch RBI double to make it 2-0 in the third. Once Napa got back to the top of the order, Cordero Ochoa, Will Wittman and Jake Tarap strung together three straight hits to up the lead to 6-0.

American got one run back in the fourth when Moreno connected for a solo home run to right. But Napa answered with a run in the fifth when Landon Houle scored from third on a 4-6-3 double play — American’s second twin-killing of the night — and Napa’s defensive brilliance took care of the rest.

“I think they played a perfect game,” Jason Gordon said of Napa’s defense. “We were trying to fight, keep the pressure on. I’ll tell you what, they played clean defense, they didn’t walk anybody, and then we just kept striking balls right at them.”

The defensive highlight reel started in the first inning when Wong was robbed of extra bases on a booming fly ball to left-center that got tracked down in front of the fence for a long out. Then in the second, Tarap, Napa’s catcher, helped stifle American’s bases-loaded rally by picking a nasty pitch in the dirt with a quick backhand to keep baserunner Pono Rosenberg at third. American ultimately stranded the bases loaded.

In the third, Tarap took a bunt single away from Wong by pouncing like a cat on the trickler in front of the plate for a cannon throw to first. Then with a runner at second and two outs, O’Brien hit a bolt up toward the right-center gap, only to see right-fielder Andrew Keller make a catch at the end of a dead sprint by timing a ballet-style leap to glove it.

In the fourth, with one on and two out, American had another hit taken away when the center fielder Ochoa crashed hard on a sinking liner off the bat of William Meza to nab it on the run. To start the fifth, Leach at short made another brilliant snag on a sharp one-hopper off the bat of Maddox Stone to get the first out of a 1-2-3 inning. Then in the sixth, before the game-ending double play, left fielder Talon Harley tracked down a sinking blooper off the bat of Carter Weyer with a diving catch for the first out of the inning.

“Today we had bad luck,” Ward said. “I don’t think one run describes how we were hitting, and I think the seven runs on their side of the scoreboard — they had a good day on offense.”

American’s lone offensive highlight was a fun one.

Moreno’s solo shot down the right-field line in the fourth landed beyond the wall right in the hands of super-fan Tommy Peyovich. Fans from the District 52 tournament at Middlefield Ballpark might remember Peyovich as the well-tanned, barefooted man sitting in the lawn chair behind the plate for each of American’s games. Peyovich was sitting in that same lawn chair just beyond the right-field fence beside the foul pole. He didn’t have to move as he made a sweet, barehanded catch of Moreno’s blast.

Peyovich is a coach during the San Mateo American regular season, and also works with the American All-Stars pitchers, as well as coaches with the West Coast Federals.

“I know him well,” said Moreno, who managed a smile when he said he wasn’t trying to hit it to Peyovich. “He’s helped me a lot with pitching and motivation.”

San Mateo American — a team that as 10-year-old two years ago won the Nor Cal championship — had many of the same core players on roster this season. One addition to this year’s team was Ryan Derossett, and inspiration in that not only did he not play for either of the 10s or 11s Little League All-Stars teams over the past two seasons, but he never even cracked the auxiliary Superbowl roster consisting of the league’s next-best group of players.

“I thought I had a good season,” said Derossett, who hit four home runs for the San Mateo American A’s in the regular season. “I was still lucky to get picked for this All-Star team.”

Still, joining a core group that included the high-profile pitching prowess of O’Brien, Ward, Moreno and Connor Workman — the four pillars of American excellence over the last three summers — could have been intimidating.

But it wasn’t. For this group of 12 Little Leaguers, the way the team wrapped their postgame huddle with a unified rally cry of “American!” and kept it together long enough to hug it out with coaches, parents and one journalist, until they could take a casual stroll out to the left-field wall to take in the moment, just the 12 of them, tells you all you need to know about one extraordinary run by 12 extraordinary kids.

“From Day One I could tell that they had a big bond, and I was lucky to enter that bond and be part of this team,” Derossett said. “We went this far not just because of skill but because of friendship with each other.”