May 8, 2019 5 min read

McMURRAY – Canon-McMillan High School baseball coach Tim Bruzdewicz said before the season that the main thing for his team was getting to the WPIAL playoffs. Once there, anything can happen.

He knew there would be bumps in the road for the WPIAL and PIAA Class 6A defending champions.

The Big Macs flirted with making, then not making the postseason. They lost five of their last seven entering their Class 6A Section 3 finale. They chose against shortening the rest of ace Cam Weston to pitch in a section game against Bethel Park on Monday. And Wednesday night, they danced in and out of danger for the first four innings.

Turns out, they flirted a little too long.

After stranding six baserunners in the first four innings, Peters Township’s Mark Lehman and Matthew Levy laced a pair of doubles to score three runs in the bottom of the fifth inning as the Indians turned the tables with four unanswered runs to eliminate Canon-McMillan from playoff contention with a 4-2 victory at Peterswood Park.

Canon-McMillan (5-7, 9-9) needed to win and have Mt. Lebanon lose to Upper St. Clair to qualify for the postseason. The Blue Devils lost to USC, 3-2. If the Big Macs would have held onto their lead, then they would have qualified for the playoffs for the fifth consecutive season.

“We created our own doom,” Bruzdewicz said. “It seemed like we ran out of luck. It was just the little things. We kept repping them and repping them but they never came to fruition this year. We just didn’t get it done and that’s on me.”

Lehman got it done after flying out with the bases loaded to end the third inning. His line-drive double to the right-centerfield gap scored a pair of runs to tie the game at 2-2. Levy’s double, which floated between the Big Macs’ left fielder and center fielder, scored Lehman, which resulted in the game-winning run.

It didn’t end without one last-ditch from Canon-McMillan with its season on the line. The Big Macs loaded the bases with one out on Lehman in the sixth before striking out twice and failing to score. Lehman, who relieved Mark Edeburn to start the sixth inning, struck out the side in the seventh to close out the victory and earn a two-inning save.

“I was still a little pumped from that hit in the bottom of the (fifth) inning,” Lehman said. “I knew it was the bottom of their order and that I just needed to throw strikes. When I came through with the bat it felt great. We had to get some runs sooner or later.”

It was a late surge by Peters Township the first time the two neighboring rivals played that lifted the Indians to a win. The win Wednesday night ended the Indians’ two-game losing streak, during which they scored only three runs.

Sam Quinn added an insurance run for the Indians with a RBI single in the sixth inning to extend the PT lead to 4-2.

“It was no different with how we’ve been playing from the beginning of the year and the last two games. We just weren’t getting the key base hit when we needed it,” said Peters Township coach Joe Maize. “The first two or three innings we left six guys on and it starts to creep into the back of your mind. They fed off the energy from the bench and those three runs (in the fifth) felt pretty good, not only for me but for the kids.”

Canon-McMillan first took the lead when Brycen Virgili scored on a line-drive single to left field by pinch-hitter Casey Burke in the second inning. Virgili, who went 3-for-3 and was a triple shy of the cycle, hit a solo home run to double the Big Macs’ lead to 2-0 in the fourth.

Peters Township (9-3, 12-6) turned two hits, one error, two hit batsmen and a walk into the three runs that gave it the lead for good.

“The teams I’ve had over the last couple years have been through it so many times,” Bruzdewicz said. “When it was a tough game their heartbeats were slow. These guys, we have six new guys out there, it’s like little rabbit hearts.

“Cam Weston has a great arm but he’s been throwing 100 pitches every five or six days for the last two months. There are only so many bullets in that gun. I told him to go as hard as he could for as long as he could.”

Weston had four strikeouts and allowed the three runs over five innings.

Edeburn limited C-M to two runs on four hits through five innings to earn the win. He improves 5-0 on the season.

“This is huge,” Maize said. “I used the word disappointed after the Mt. Lebanon loss because we felt that we were the better team, but you can’t say that when they beat you twice. I was disappointed our kids didn’t have the opportunity to win a section title. The fact that they came back and won tonight helps springboard us into the playoffs.”