High school baseball: Maple Mountain earns first-ever baseball state title

No. 2-seed Maple Mountain won 7-4 in a gutsy performance Saturday against No. 1-seed Brighton to claim its first state baseball championship since the school opened in 2009.

Maple Mountain pulled off an impressive feat by scoring a combined 19 runs in two games against a Brighton defense that allowed just 58 runs during the regular season.

A big second inning for the Golden Eagles proved to be the difference as they crossed home plate four times, with an hour long rain delay mixed in.

Down 2-1, the first run in the frame came as Colby Warren walked with the bases loaded (it was the fourth consecutive walk). Though the weather may have cooled with the rain, Maple Mountain leadoff hitter AJ Thomas did not, as he came out of the delay and laced a single to left field for two RBIs.

He would finish 2 for 3 in the game.

Cy Chrisman, the leading RBI man for Maple Mountain, then hit a sacrifice fly to left-center to tack on another run.

Holding a 5-3 lead in the fourth inning after Brighton scored another run, the Golden Eagles did get into some trouble. With one out and two Bengals on base, sophomore pitcher Cayden Giles entered the game because of pitch count rules despite only pitching 4 1/3 innings in three appearances the entire season to that point.

Giles retired the eight batters that he faced, with four of them coming via strikeout.

“They tell me all the time, ‘You’ve shone in JV, go do the same up here,’” Giles said. “They just told me to keep being me and that’s exactly what I did.

“There’s a lot of people here and it definitely gets to you, but I mean, it’s between me and my catcher.”

Said coach Jeremy Thomas: “Cayden early on pitched in a big game against Dixie High School, obviously one of the better 4A schools, and he shut them down for a couple innings.

“We kind of knew that he had that bulldog in him and we knew he was going to throw strikes.”

Maple Mountain added two more runs in the sixth inning and Brighton added an ultimately inconsequential one in the seventh as the Golden Eagles won the championship in Thomas’ third season leading the program.

“It feels really good. It feels great, I can’t deny that,” he said. “The credit really goes to those players. They’re the ones that put in the work. They’re the ones that ultimately have to step up and perform.”