WORLD SERIES GAME FIVE: PRICE BRINGS YUMA WITHIN ONE

Price was right in the Yuma night

October 13: With his second dominant start of the 2014 BARB World Series, David Price put his team on the brink of their third World Championship.

Flashback to October 8, the opening game of this series. David Price takes the mound in Casselton and pitches six strong innings for the win, giving up seven hits and one run while whiffing nine Horned Toads batters. Five days later, he was again handed the ball, this time in his home ballpark. This time, he wouldn’t need help from his occasionally suspect bullpen. Price cruised through a complete-game shutout and received an early explosion from his offense to put the Yuma Firebirds ahead in the best-of-seven World Series, three games to two.

Opposite Price and making his first start in the series was Tanner Roark. The rookie’s last appearance was a six-inning, one-run start in the clinching game of the division series. Roark trotted to the mound in the bottom of the first hoping to continue his great season, but early returns were disastrous. With one away, Anthony Rendon singled to left. Andrew McCutchen followed with an opposite-field double that put Rendon in position to score on Casey McGehee’s groundout. Ryan Zimmerman kept the inning going, beating out an infield single, and Ryan Braun followed with the emphatic exclamation point of a blast to left for a 4-0 lead.

Roark completed a 1-2-3 second inning, but McCutchen’s second double to right field sent the youngster to the showers in the third. Nick Vincent came on and, with the exception of a McGehee RBI single (closing the book on Roark’s two-plus inning, six-hit, five-run shellacking), shut the door for the rest of the third and the fourth inning.

Price, meanwhile, was shutting down the Horned Toads offense. He allowed one runner each in the third-through-fifth innings before encountering his first trouble in the sixth (after the Firebird offense plated another in the bottom of the fifth). Scooter Gennett led off the Casselton sixth with a single, but he was erased on a Jean Segura double play. Had the twin killing not occurred, the inning may have put the visitors back in the game. Carlos Gomez and Adrian Beltre followed with singles to right, but the frame ended when Justin Upton struck out.

The rest of the game flew by, Price retiring the side in order in the seventh and eighth. Rendon helped the Yuma cause with a two-out solo home run in the bottom of the eighth, so Price had a seven-run cushion to work with when he stepped to the slab in the ninth. Hot-hitting Gomez greeted the lefty with a double, but Beltre, Will Venable and Adrian Gonzalez went down in order.

Price had completed his shutout on 123 pitches, allowing seven hits and striking out eight without walking a batter. Contributors abounded up and down the Yuma lineup, with four players stroking multiple hits. All of that added up to the first blowout of the hotly-contested series, and it gave Chris Melkonian hope his squad would carry the momentum over and clinch the series in Casselton in Game Six.

FINAL: YUMA 7, CASSELTON 0