– by Theo, junior –

In the final tournament of the year, the FBTA baseball team beat Fresta Valley on Thursday by a score of 21-1, and won the championship Saturday against Faith by a score of 9-3. This represents an amazing accomplishment for a school that restarted its baseball program a mere three years ago.  

At the beginning of the year, there was a desire among the ODACS schools to have a baseball tournament for the first time in 10 years, but hindered by the fact that there are not yet four ODACS baseball teams. Mr. Munday, the director of FBTA baseball operations, was instrumental in coordinating the entire tournament. The teams involved were three ODACS teams, FBTA, Heritage, and Faith, and Fresta Valley was invited into the tournament to make the 4th team. 

Fairfax was the first overall seed with a 4-0 record against all teams, Faith was the second seed with a 2-1 record, Heritage was the third seed with a 1-2 record, and Fresta was the fourth seed with an 0-2 record.  

FBTA went into the game against Fresta as heavy favorites. Fresta was also missing two of their top players because of injuries and an inability to get away from work. Theo M and Luke R each pitched 2 innings and a variety of players got hits and contributed. However, the biggest contribution came off the bat of Caleb V with the first grand slam in FBTA baseball history. Caleb’s grand slam took the lead from 9-1 to 13-1 and really put the game away. Overall, the game was never really in doubt and the focus transitioned to winning a championship.  

There was an immense amount of pressure on the team to win the championship, as Fairfax was the first school to restart their baseball program. The championship game with Faith got off to a great start as Faith made three quick outs. Then Fairfax in the bottom half of the inning immediately put 3 runs on the board. From there Fairfax tacked on 2-3 runs every inning and didn’t run into any problems defensively until the fourth inning. 

With the score being 9-0 and FBTA seeming to be completely dominant, Faith put together a rally based off of some walks, errors, and a few hits. However, Fairfax escaped the inning relatively unscathed with a lead of 9-3. At this point, Fairfax focused more of its efforts on closing out the game rather than tacking on more runs. With a ground ball to Samuel M and an easy throw to Luke R, Fairfax won the championship. The players and coaches charged the field and celebrated by dumping the Gatorade cooler over Coach Varricchione’s head. 

Fairfax’s contributions to the all-tournament team included Theo M (a complete 7-inning game in the championship, 6-8 at the plate) Caleb V (a grand slam and 5-8 at the plate), Luke R (2 innings pitched on Thursday, 4-6 at the plate), and Quincy K (caught every inning of the tourney and went 4-6 at the plate). 

Overall, a great tournament from the Fairfax baseball team that ended in a championship for the first time in a very long time for the FBTA baseball program.