Miners win ABL title

PALMER — It was fitting that the Mat-Su Miners showered themselves with Martinelli’s apple cider Thursday night.

Because victory’s sweet, especially when it nets you an Alaska Baseball League crown.

Mat-Su starter Tyler Johnson pitched six scoreless innings and the Miners scored five runs in the fifth en route to a 10-0 title-clinching win over the Anchorage Glacier Pilots at Hermon Brothers Field.

“You couldn’t have scripted it any better,” Mat-Su head coach Russell Raley said, mere minutes after his players doused him with a cooler of ice water following the win. “Shutting somebody out, shutting them out at home, a rival like the Pilots. All credit goes to the players. They bought in from the start.”

Mat-Su improved to 28-14 in league play and moved 3 1/2 games ahead of the second-place Anchorage Bucs with the win in its 2009 home finale.

More than 1,000 fans watched as reliever Clayton Ehlert forced Anchorage’s Trevor Hairgrove to ground out to Mat-Su shortstop Chad Marshall in the top of the ninth, the final out in the Miners win.

And they stayed as he Miners dove into a celebratory pile at midfield and sprayed bottles of apple cider near the home dugout.

“Our fans deserve it,” Mat-Su outfielder James Ramsey said. “They’re the best fans in the league.”

Ramsey led the Miners with two hits, center fielder Nick Cox walked four times and scored three runs and catcher Bobby Jacobs drove in two runs to help the Miners build a nine-run lead by the end of the fifth inning.

Cox scored from first on a David Alleman double to give the Miners the early 1-0 lead in the second, and then Mat-Su broke it open in the fourth.

“I thought it was going to be a close game at first, and then we pushed across a few,” Johnson said.

Jacobs used a two-run single with the bases loaded in the fourth to give Mat-Su the 3-0 lead, and Alleman scored on a bases-loaded Anchorage balk later in the inning.

Mat-Su put the game out of reach with five more runs in the fifth.

Scott Arthur reached on one of Anchorage’s six errors and scored on a wild pitch. Ramsey walked and gave the Miners the 6-0 advantage when he scored on a Ross Blondin double.

Blondin and Shane Brown each scored on Anchorage errors during the inning, and Marshall pushed Cox across the plate with a sacrifice fly.

Four of those five runs came with no outs.

The Miners had three extra base hits in the game — doubles by Ramsey, Alleman and Blondin — but Mat-Su did much of its damage with aggressive base running and the ability to take advantage of 10 walks issued by Anchorage pitchers and a half-dozen errors by the Pilots.

“That’s been our mentality all year,” Ramsey said. “We’re not a big home run hitting team. We’ve got a lot of guys who hit for pretty decent averages, and we play together. If we’re going to have a big inning, we’re going to do it together.”

While the Miners piled on the runs, Johnson and a pair of relievers kept the Pilots off the scoreboard.

Johnson allowed three hits, while fanning four hitters during six innings of work. Jeremy Atkins struck out three, while pitching a pair of perfect innings. Ehlert closed it out with a perfect ninth.

Johnson, a Stony Brook product who was added midway through the summer, improved to 3-0 and lowered his earned run average to a slim 0.98.

“The great thing is, I didn’t expect to be here three weeks ago,” Johnson said. “Nothing beats winning a championship.”

With the win, Mat-Su secured its second ABL title since 2004, and will finish with the most wins in the league for the third time in six years.

The Anchorage Bucs can still finish the season with the same number of wins as Mat-Su, but the Miners have already won the season series with the Bucs and hold the tiebreaker. The Bucs, who are currently 3 1/2 games back, are in the middle of a two-game set against the Peninsula Oilers in Kenai. On Thursday, Anchorage led 9-1 in the seventh, but the game was postponed due to rain. The contest will be resumed today at 5 p.m., and will preceded a scheduled game, slated for 6 p.m.

The Bucs and the Miners meet Saturday at 11 a.m. during the first day of the ABL Major League Baseball Showcase in Anchorage.

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