Badgers bag the bronze 0
The London Badgers came home with their fourth medal in as many years from the Canadian Midget baseball championships held in Quebec City.
The Badgers won the bronze medal at the championships held in Quebec on the weekend and while it wasn't a gold, head coach Mike Lumley was thrilled.
The Badgers, representing Ontario, defeated Quebec 3-2 in eight innings to finish third. The Badgers were defending Canadian midget champs.
In four years the Badgers have brought home two gold and two bronze medals.
"We were talking about it and the younger half of the team that came up only won eight games all last year. For them to come up and mix with the older guys and actually get to this point is absolutely phenomenal," he said. "It's a great testament to their will to get a medal out of this."
The Badgers lost a chance at the gold earlier the day when they fell behind Alberta 4-0 and wound up losing 6-3.
This Badger team was a mixture of young players sprinkled with veterans. It was an older pitching staff that did a lot of the heavy slugging for the Badgers.
Matt Smith went the distance in the bronze medal game, going eight innings and giving up just two hits. He threw 103 pitches, just two short of the limit imposed on pitchers in championship games.
Chris McQueen had three hits with Mike Ambrose getting two. Andrew Warner had a hit and walked three times.
"It was an amazing outing," Lumley said. "Dan (Parsons) probably had just as good a game in the crossover game (against Alberta) but we made two or three errors that cost us."
The Badgers finished the tournament at 6-1.
The Badgers did everything they could to move on in this tournament. That included winning a 1-0 game earlier in which the Badgers only got one hit.
"You just capitalize on mistakes sometimes. You want to keep in the game," Lumley said. "This is a team that just keeps in the game. We go down, they come back. The other team scores, we score right away. This is a team that absolutely does not quit."
That's the one thing that Lumley says he was most pleased about.
"Most of the teams here are almost all-star teams," he said. "They don't have to go through what we go through to qualify. We have to beat 18 other teams to get here. It's almost as hard getting here as winning here.
"This team had an unwillingness to die. There was never a time when they felt they were out. Even when we were down 4-0 to Alberta . . . the guys still felt they had an opportunity to win."