The run to a World Series championship fell one game short for Cherry Hill Atlantic’s U-16 baseball team.
Cherry Hill Atlantic allowed seven runs in the top of the first inning during Saturday’s 14-1 loss in five innings to Wilemstad, Curacao in the Senior Little League U-16 World Series championship at Easley, S.C. The game was shortened due to the 10-run rule.
Thus it ended a run for a Cherry Hill team that won 17 of 19 games in tournament action. Cherry Hill entered the title game with a 3-0 record in the World Series after winning the U.S. championship with Friday’s 12-2 victory in five innings over Hawaii. In that game, Austin Hanni, a rising junior at Cherry Hill West, earned the complete-game win.
“Today was a bitter pill, but these guys were still U.S. champs and they have nothing to go home to be ashamed about,” Cherry Hill Atlantic coach Christian Carkeek said in a phone interview after the game. “This whole journey was a dream come true.”
Cherry Hill Atlantic is comprised of youngsters from the Cherry Hill Atlantic Little League and Cherry Hill American Little League. The players on the team are either rising sophomores or juniors at Cherry Hill East and Cherry Hill West.
Curacao was a dominant offensive team throughout the tournament. In its four World Series games, Curacao scored at least 10 runs in all four contests and finished with 52 runs.
This was Curacao’s third U-16 championship, having won in 2002 and 2018.
In that first inning, Curacao had its first seven players reach base. The team had four hits and took advantage of two Cherry Hill errors in the seven-run first inning. Curacao would end up with 14 hits.
Trailing 8-0, Cherry Hill scored in the second inning on an RBI infield single by Brody Connors, scoring Tristan Perry, who had opened the inning with a walk. The other Cherry Hill hits were by Ryan Moyer and Carter Gill.
The winning pitcher was right-hander Keven Rosina. He allowed just three hits and struck out five.
“He painted on the corners and didn’t use his curveball until the third inning,” said Carkeek, who is the freshman baseball coach at Cherry Hill East. “He threw a lot of . fastballs but knew how to pitch, in and out and had us leaning over the plate.”
This was a journey that began in the final week of June and lasted nearly six weeks.
The only other loss in the tournament was a 7-4 defeat to Watsontown, PA, during an East Regional game in Bangor, Maine. Yet Cherry Hill would eventually come back and beat Pennsylvania twice in the final day, 2-0 and 7-6 to advance to the World Series.
“Until today, I used the words ‘heroic baseball’ when I talk about our team,” Carkeek said. “We got contributions from every single kid, we don’t have any true bench warmers and there isn’t a kid I didn’t trust in a big spot. They were all great.”
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