If the last few weeks has taught Vancouver fans anything, it’s the
value of pitching. When the C’s bats were stone cold quiet, when
strikeouts were so in fashion that some called them ‘the new black’,
when crowds were silent and results terrible, the one constant this
season has been pitching.

In fact, Vancouver’s pitching has been so good, for so long, that some
pundits across the NWL have stated that the team is really no better
than average - they just got lucky with some quality hurlers. I say
that’s wrong. Big time wrong. Those who write Vancouver off as an
average team and put their victory down to throwing are missing one
very quality ingredient that every successful team needs: The Gamer.

Let’s roll it back to yesterday. It’s the bottom of the 7th,
Vancouver trails 3-2, and Haas Pratt has led off with a single. Jose
Garcia grounded him into a force-out at 2nd, but Shawn Callahan then
singled to move Garcia into scoring position. The Everett Aquasox,
realizing that their pitcher was done, brought in a reliever by name of
Justin Thomas.

Thomas is a decent pitcher, he was 3-3 on the season, had racked up a
sub 3.90 ERA, and most importantly, with the left-handed Chad Boyd
coming up to the plate, Thomas is a southpaw. This wasn’t a panic move
by Everett management, it was the absolute right move. Thomas was the
man to close the .278 hitting Boyd down.

But there was something Everett hadn’t considered when they looked at
Tum-tum’s stats - Chad Boyd is a Gamer. He’s fierce. He’s hard-headed.
He’s a warrior. He refuses to lose without leaving a piece of himself
on the field.

So as Thomas bore down on Boyd and hurled a scorcher inside, Tum-Tum turned on it, and the ball did fly.

As Boyd would later tell TEAM1040’s Brook Ward, "In the first inning,
when they hit a homerun, I realized the ball was carrying today, so I
was really looking for something to pull. They’ve been coming in the
last few days, so I knew if I just waited for the right pitch it would
happen eventually. I wasn’t going to miss this one."

Boyd’s shot went deep over the right fielder - not deep enough to get
out of the ballpark, but deep enough to send Garcia and Callahan home.
Vancouver was in the lead, 4-3.

But it wasn’t over - indeed, for a Gamer, it never is… until it is.

Chad Boyd stood on second as Anthony Recker went through his pre-bat
flex routine, knowing that if the ball went fair, he was headed for
home, no matter what. Recker, to his credit, delivered the fair ball
Boyd was looking for - straight up the center.

If one negative thing can be said for Gamers, it’s that they sometimes
think with their hearts and not their heads, so when the ball was
quickly reined in by Everett center fielder David Hall, Boyd was
passing 3rd and steaming home, even though wise heads would have said
he had no business doing so.

The ball flew in to 6′3" Everett catcher, Daniel Santin, with the 5′10"
Boyd still a mile away from home plate. This left the Gamer with two
choices - either turn back, or run right through the bigger man with
enough impact to jar the ball loose.

As Boyd describes it, "I was going all the way, we needed to score that
run, the pitchers had been doing it for us all day, but we needed that
extra run. So when I saw the catcher with the ball, I knew there was no
way to slide past him, so I decided to put the hit on. [...] I played a
season of football as a linebacker, so I was definitely trying to
remember that when I ran at him."

Boyd dropped his shoulder, ran at the bigger, much better-padded man,
and slammed into him with full force. The two players slammed together,
both stayed on their feet, but the ball rolled free.

SAFE! SAFE!

"That’s baseball," said Boyd afterwards. "There were no vicious tactics, it was all legal, and it worked out in the end."

Indeed it did. Because Chad Boyd, my friends, is a freakin’ Gamer.

But he’s not alone. The night before that game, Vancouver’s Jimmy Shull
and Everett’s Harold Williams had been engaged in fierce battle on the
mound. In fact, going into the 9th inning, both pitching staffs had
kept their opponents down to just 2 hits a piece. To be sure, a lot of
that was down to good fortune, a lot was down to sheer pitching
ability, but some of it, at least on Vancouver’s side, was down to the
work of a flat-out Gamer; 19-year-old shortstop, Justin Sellers.

Bottom
of the 3rd, and the pitching is clearly dominant. Vancouver hadn’t
managed to get anyone on base with the bat, and the sounds of whiffing
were becoming commonplace. Sellers, standing at the plate for his
second time around, looked at Williams and realized he needed to shake
things up a little. So as Williams sent in his next pitch, Sellers
bunted solidly into the gap between pitcher, 2nd baseman and 1st
baseman.

His idea was simple - get the ball close enough to the 1st baseman
so that the pitcher would have to cover the base, then beat him to the
bag in a foot race. More often than not, the pitcher will win this race
because they have less ground to cover. But Justin Sellers is fast. And
Harold Williams is not.

Aquasox 1st baseman Jeffrey Flaig was committed - he had to grab the
ball, and as soon as he did, realizing that Williams wasn’t going to
make the distance, he ran at Sellers to make a tag. Sellers, seeing the arm coming at him,
shimmied his shoulders around the tag like a wide receiver dodging a
tackle, and then, realizing that the 2nd baseman was looming at the
base in cover, dived headfirst to the bag, wrapping his arms around it
like a life preserver on the Titanic.

As the dust settled, Sellers lay flat, clutching the bag like a long
lost love, as three bewildered, dismayed Aquasox players stood
above him, wondering exactly what they’d have to do to have gotten
the little bastard out.

It was a full-on Gamer move, especially considering Sellers had minor surgery on his toe a few days prior.

But he wasn’t done. Going into the 8th, Sellers was revealing himself
to be the man to beat. Even as his teammates had only managed one more
hit in the previous five innings, Sellers had stood on base three
times, drawing a pair of walks to keep the crowd from falling asleep.
But as he stood out at short, with the scores dead level and both teams
looking for a mere sniff of a run-scoring chance, he was about to show
he can play D as well as hit, walk, run, shimmy and slide.

With one out gone and Everett #9 Robert Hudson at the plate, the hitter
managed to knock a high bouncing shot up the middle. The ball, just
high enough to get over pitcher Danielin Acevedo’s glove on the way up,
was coming down in perhaps the toughest spot possible. As Sellers and
Wilber Perez loomed, it was clear that if they didn’t run headfirst
into each other, chances were bad they’d be able to stop the ball as it
hit the ground between them.

As the crowd gasped, Sellers and Perez converged. For my money, someone
was about to get hurt, but Sellers noticed Perez coming, adjusted
slightly, snared the ball just inches off the ground, and dodged Perez
by an inch. He then spun away from 1st base, planted his back foot and
rocketed in a precision throw that beat the runner by milliseconds, for
one of the most stylish, balletic, Major League-standard infield plays
seen at Nat Bailey Stadium in years.

Gamers make their own luck, so the very next at-bat, as Casey Craig
grounded the ball hard at Sellers and it took a nasty bounce off the
edge of the grass, hitting the infielder in the sternum, the ball
ricocheted off Sellers and dropped into the glove of Wilber Perez at
2nd base for an easy out at 1st. Fortune favors the brave.

And he wasn’t done yet. Sellers would draw another walk in the bottom
of the 8th - his second of the night, taking him to base for the 3rd
time in 4 plate appearances, on a day when only one of his teammates
had managed a single base hit. He would go on to draw a 3rd walk in the
11th inning, to help his team come back from a 2-run deficit and push
the game to 14 innings.

Anthony
Recker is a Gamer, though one who seems to sometimes lack belief in his
own abilities at times. In the top of the 11th inning of that same game, with
Everett having scored two runs to break the 0-0 deadlock, Mike Massaro
grabbed the ball in deep center field and rocketed a throw to Sellers
at short, who in turn gunned one to home to catch J.B. Tuckerill trying
to score.

Anthony Recker is no small guy. In fact, he’s a monster of a man. So
when that throw hit his glove and Tuckerill realized his only way home
was through Pipes, he must have wondered whether baseball was really
the sport for him. But give him credit where it’s due, he ran on
regardless.

Recker, in response, braced himself, protected the ball, bounced
Tuckerill backwards and slammed his helmet on the plate as he trotted
off to the dugout with a sneer that would kill a mule from twenty paces.

It wasn’t that Recker had a great game on paper (he went 1-6 with a
double on the night), and it wasn’t that the play he made was a play
that was unexpected. It was that, on Recker’s face, it was clear that
right there, right then, with his team trailing, he would have run
through a concrete wall if it meant he could turn things back to
Vancouver’s favor. That look he gave Tuckerill, and the sound his
shoulder made as it dropped into Tuckerill’s chest, told the crowd and
everyone else in attendance that Anthony Recker is not just a good
baseball player.

Recker is a Gamer.

And if the Vancouver Canadians
manage a spot in the playoffs this season, it’ll be the Gamers that
they’ll rely on to be the difference. Gamers like Boyd, Sellers,
Recker, Shull, Mike Madsen, Brad Kilby, and Brad Davis. Guys who, in
Pete Rose’s words, would walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play
baseball.

Hell or Tri-City, whichever comes first.