Miners cap season with win

ANCHORAGE — The Mat-Su Miners enjoyed a pretty memorable summer.

Mat-Su captured its second Alaska Baseball League title in five years, and finished with the league high in wins for the third time since 2004.

And on Monday, the Miners put the exclamation point on their 2009 campaign. Mat-Su scored eight unanswered runs to post an 8-4 come-from-behind victory over the Peninsula Oilers during the third day of the ABL Major League Baseball Showcase at Mulcahy Stadium in Anchorage.

After allowing four early runs in the first, Mat-Su exploded for four runs in the fifth and scored eight times during the final six innings to finish the season a league-best 29-17.

“This team, since I’ve been here, has never given up,” said Mat-Su third baseman Ross Blondin, who finished with three hits and three runs scored in the win. “(The team) always goes out there and pushes runs across when they can. We keep battling.”

And what has become fairly typical for the 2009 edition of the Valley ball club, Mat-Su used speed, hustle and a bit of timely hitting to leap back into the game.

Trailing 4-2 in the fifth, Scott Arthur singled and then broke up a potential double play to help James Ramsey reach on a fielder’s choice.

Shane Brown followed with a single, and Arthur hustled around the base paths to score from second.

Ramsey scored on a Blondin single to tie the score at 4, and Mat-Su took its first lead of the game when Blondin scored on an error.

“I really appreciate their effort,” Mat-Su head coach Russell Raley said after meeting with his players on the field for the final time this season. “They could have come up here and been a bunch of individuals like some of the other teams up here — just kind of going their own way and playing for their own stats — but they didn’t do that. They were committed to playing as a team and obviously it paid off for us.”

Arthur and Blondin each had a team-high three hits in the game. Reserve Trevor Costin came off the bench and finished 2-for-2 with a team-high 2 RBI. Six different Miners scored, and five had at least one RBI.

“It was a total team effort,” Blondin said. “It was a good way to finish the season off.”

After the Kenai-based squad chased Mat-Su starter Will Musson off the mound after just two-thirds of an inning, Sam Murphy came in and got the Miners through the fifth and earned the win.

“He’s done a great job for us all summer,” Raley said of Murphy. “We kind of had things scripted. We wanted everyone to pitch during the Showcase. It kind of worked out, and he did a great job.”

Tyler Johnson, Dan Jensen and Ryan Cole combined for three scoreless innings. The Oilers took advantage of three early walks and scored four runs in the first. Ryan Fisher tripled in the inning, and drove in two runs.

But despite Kenai’s work in the first, Raley was happy to see his team come back once again.

“I just thought we didn’t quit, just like we hadn’t all summer,” Raley said. “It was really great to see, this team never quit one time all summer. I can’t really express how imp that is.

Contact Frontiersman sports editor Jeremiah Bartz at sports@frontiersman.com.