The Humboldt Pee Wee Dodgers are the Provincial A Baseball champions.
The Provincial A Pee Wee Baseball Championship was hosted by Yorkton on July 20-22. The championship was broken into two pools of three. Humboldt was placed in a pool with Lloydminster and Melville. The other pool consisted of the host team Yorkton, Kindersley and a team from Saskatoon.
The Dodgers faced Melville in game one Saturday morning. Behind the strong pitching performances of Landon Seipp, Erik Gardiner and Rylan Marianchuk, the Dodgers were able to mercy the Melville team after four innings, when they reached a score of 22-5.
Morgan Gobeil, Erik Gardiner, Tyler McWillie, Tyson Earis and Jacob Wasserman all led the Dodger offence with two hits each.
The Lloydminster Twins were the Dodgers' second opposition. Thomas Bollefer and Jordan Seipp combined a strong pitching performance, holding the Twins' bats almost scoreless over four innings. Lloydminster fielded a very young team and had a lot of trouble keeping the Dodger bats silent.
The Dodgers scored 20 runs to the Twins' one, with Morgan Gobeil, Tyler McWillie and Thomas Bollefer, leading the Dodger attack with two hits each.
The round robin play concluded Saturday evening with a knock-out game to determine finals for Sunday. The Dodgers were able to get first place and did not need to play a playoff game until Sunday morning.
The playoff structure almost favored the Dodgers' pitching for the semifinals on Sunday according to assistant coach Mark Marianchuk, "with the pitch count numbers being so low in Pee Wee baseball it was sure nice to have our best pitchers available for Sunday".
Sunday morning, the Dodgers faced the Lloydminster Twins once again, after they had defeated the Saskatoon A's the night before.
Morgan Gobeil snapped off a gem of a game according to assistant coach Mike Suchan: "Morgan was on his game with very good command of the strike zone and velocity on his fastball."
Gobeil's pitching allowed the Dodgers to play aggressive offensive baseball, taking advantage of their good team speed to steal many bases. The Dodgers' offence was paced by Erik Gardiner collecting a triple and a single.
The Dodgers won handily, 19-1.
The opponent for the final was Melville. Erik Gardiner took the hill and dominated with a hard fastball and mix of speeds, keeping Melville's bats to just one run, while the Dodgers were able to score in the double digits.
Final score: 16-1 for Humboldt.
According to assistant coach Leon Winkel, the Dodgers were very well prepared for Provincials this year, "playing Muenster Pee Wees and competing in a AA Pee Wee league in Saskatoon really toughened up the boys and allowed them to face good pitching night in and out."
The Dodger offence was led by Thomas Bollefer and Erik Gardiner.
Shaun Gardiner is the head coach of the Humboldt Pee Wee Dodgers.
