Class 3A baseball: Tristen Babbitt pitches Washington to third straight title
SHAWNEE — Washington’s Tristen Babbitt bent to the ground, simultaneously overcome with emotion and bracing for the dogpile that was about to flatten him in front of the pitcher’s mound of Ed Skelton Field.
The celebration of a Class 3A state championship three-peat engulfed the Warriors’ pitcher after the final out of a 4-0 win over Perry on Saturday, and no player deserved to be the centerpiece of the festivities more than Babbitt.
The senior left-hander pitched a complete-game shutout, allowing four hits and three walks with eight strikeouts in his final high school game, and the emotion of it all was strong.
“My dad passed away when I was 14,” Babbitt said, tears welling in his eyes. “I wrote his death day on my arm today. I was thanking God for him.
“This is such a great team. We grew up with each other. There’s no better coaching staff or team that I could ask for.”
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Effectively mixing his pitches between a fastball, slider and changeup, Babbitt didn’t give up a hit until the fourth inning and never allowed a Perry baserunner past second. He got good support from an aggressive offense, even if it wasn’t producing a lot of solid contact.
Washington took a 1-0 lead in the top of the third inning when Dax McCaskill’s sacrifice fly scored Mayson Thomas. In the sixth, the Warriors took advantage of Perry’s defensive miscues to score two more runs while getting just one hit — a single by Liam Keltner that snuck just past the infield dirt.
And McCaskill scored the final run, reaching with a single and moving to third on a hit-and-run groundout before being driven in by Easton Berglan.
“I didn’t think we swung it great up and down the lineup, but we put it in play at the right times,” coach Jeff Kulbeth said. “We’re so aggressive on the basepaths, and you know how it is when you play in these games, anytime there’s a bobbled ball or an error or something, it just magnifies.
“We were just fortunate to take advantage.”
Washington became just the fifth team in Class 3A and above to win three consecutive baseball championships, and the most recent of the group since Saturday’s host, Shawnee, took three straight 5A titles in 2015-17.
“With what our kids have done, the ability to just stay with the process, stay the course, buy in to what we’ve done as a program — when our leaders do that, the rest follow,” Kulbeth said. “Is it easy? No, it’s not easy. But it sure is incredible.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Oklahoma HS baseball: Tristen Babbitt pitches Washington to three-peat
