Summit Shasta grabs share of Private School Athletic League baseball title

With two on and two outs in the bottom of the seventh, More leadoff hitter Quintin Selway connected with a long line drive to center field. The ball initially looked ticketed for the power alley, but Summit Shasta center fielder Max Espinola sprinted back and set himself under it to grab it for the final out of the 2022 Private School Athletic League regular season.

“I threw it right down the middle, he pieced it up, and I think the wind just held it up there,” Kuang said. “I got scared, I’m not going to lie. But I trusted by defense from the beginning. I saw him square up to catch the ball and right when he caught it, it was a good feeling. We finally beat them.”

With the win, the Black Bears earn a share of the PSAL North Division baseball championship, drawing even atop the standings with More (11-1, 18-5). When the two teams met earlier this season, More rallied for a 5-4 win in extra innings in Daly City.

While the two teams share the league title, Summit Shasta earns the PSAL North’s one automatic bid to the Central Coast Section playoffs by virtue of head-to-head score, outscoring the Knights by a cumulative total of 9-8 through the two matchups.

Black Bears manager Vic Gallant said More will likely earn an at-large bid to the CCS playoffs.

“We’ve got run differential now, for sure,” Gallant said. “So, we’re good … but it looks like the top two in our conference are going to go (to the playoffs). We’re not going to see them but they’re a great team.

The run that put Summit Shasta over the top in the season run differential came with a madman’s steal of home plate by Gaudario.

Gaudario, the Black Bears’ cleanup hitter, had already given his team the lead with a clutch one-out RBI single to score Kuang. On the play, the More outfield mishandled the ball, allowing Gaudario to motor around to third base. After More starting pitcher Tim Selway bounced back with a strikeout, Summit Shasta’s Espinola worked the count full.

Then, inexplicably, on the 3-2 pitch, Gaudario broke for home plate. Espinola took the pitch for the walk, but the right-handed hitter was a perfect shield to allow Gaudario to sprint across the plate in stealth mode for a stand-up steal of home. The madman element of the play was Espinola, with two strikes on him, did not have the take sign.

“To be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about that,” Gaudario said. “Naturally, it’s in the back of your mind. But when you’re in the game, and there’s a lot of adrenaline, that’s not really your focus. … This was my rationale: It’s 3-and-2; he’s either going to walk or he’s going to hit the ball. If I just run home, my team’s not going to get mad at me. And if I score, I score.”

Gaudario said he stole the base on his own whim, so it wasn’t a designed play. But Gallant signed off on his junior speedster’s decision.

“[Espinola] usually goes up the middle … so [Gaudario] was pretty safe,” Gallant said.

Kuang did the rest with a masterful performance on the mound. It was the senior’s first complete game of the year. And he had to earn it, navigated a tumultuous first inning in which he surrendered three runs and three hits, and even balked a run home.

“I was this close to yanking him,” Gallant said.

Kuang went on to post six scoreless frames, holding More to seven hits while striking out 12.

He threw 105 pitches, with his hat popping off his head mid-pitch on about 90 of them. Gallant blamed the hat fiasco on Kuang’s Yu Darvish hair. And Summit Shasta senior David Velis recommended they might need to remedy the situation with a zip tie.

“You can tell he’s throwing extra power on every pitch though,” Velis said.

As he has all season, Kuang got it done at the plate as well.

Summit Shasta scratched out an unearned run in the fourth when junior Jacob Devis scoring from third on a two-out infield error. Then in the fifth, the Black Bears sent eight batters to the plate amid the comeback rally.

No. 9 hitter Caden Frost — himself a remarkable story, making his first varsity start at catcher Friday with Kuang, the regular catcher, on the mound and backup catcher Ben Del Rosario unable to catch due to a kidney infection — led off the inning with a single, the first of five straight knocks for Summit Shasta. Velis singled next, with Del Rosario at designated hitter singling home Frost to make it 3-2.

Kuang followed with an RBI single to tie it with Del Rosario getting thrown out at third base on the play. Kuang proceeded to swipe two bags, stealing his way around to third to score easily on Gaudario’s RBI single.

“It was good to see us down early and fight back in it,” Gallant said. “I was telling a couple of the guys early that were worried: ‘Look, we have a long way to go. This game just started. We can hit better than these guys.’ And we did.”

That’s really saying something. More entered the day batting .363 as a team. Summit Shasta is indeed hitting better, finishing the regular season with a .382 team batting average.

But the Knights nearly had the last laugh when Quentin Selway connected with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, only to have the long line drive find the glove of Espinola in center.

“When I saw that coming towards me, my life flashed before my eyes,” Espinola said. “My heart was probably 250 beats per minute. I’m so glad I made that play. And it feels good right now.”

This marks the second all-time PSAL North championship for the relatively new baseball program at Summit Shasta, which joined the CCS in 2018. The Black Bears won their first PSAL North title in 2019, when Kuang and Velis were freshmen. The team is still looking for its first CCS playoff victory.

“It feels great,” Velis said. “Me and Larry, we’ve been riding together since our freshman year. … This means a lot. Our senior year, we kind of made sure we were going to leave it all out there this season. We put our hearts out there for this game today.”