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This week, the 2022 Hinds Eagles will play in the Region 23 Tournament in Poplarville. Their first round opponent is the defending Region 23 champion and seven time Division II national champion, LSU-Eunice.
This weekend I was thinking about my teams that played in this tournament years ago. It’s amazing how these things stay fresh in your mind decades after they happen. The regional is the first national tournament on the path to the Division II World Series. With 16 teams in a very good Region 23, the winner of the tournament advances directly to the Series in Enid, Oklahoma.
But back in the old days, before there were divisions in JUCO baseball, you had to win a regional tournament and then a district series or tournament to advance to the only World Series there was at the time, the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Hinds’ first appearance in a Region 23 Tournament was in 1987, one week after we swept Mississippi Delta in a hard fought best-of-three series that I still believe was the best Mississippi state championship series ever played. The Trojans got their revenge with a 10-5 win over us and won their first Region 23 Championship.
We had lost to Gulf Coast in the opener, 5-1, came back the next day to eliminate Delgado 10-2 and then beat Gulf Coast, 11-6 to advance to the championship game against Delta.
Delta would then host the Eastern District Tournament the following week and we got an invite, too because we were the number 2 team in Region 23. Delta, Hinds, Roane State (TN), and national powerhouse, Louisburg College (NC). Louisburg won. They roughed us up in the opener, but we battled Roane, but lost 9-8 in 12 innings.
Our first Region 23 championship came during the great history making 1989 season. We had already won the MACJC South Division and State Championships. We beat MDCC in the opener, Delgado in the winner’s bracket game, and Delgado again in the championship game.
Delgado would have to beat us twice to advance, but I’ve never forgotten the legendary “Rags” Scheuerrman standing at home plate holding an unfolded roadmap and discussing with the umpires the best route to get from Meridian to Greenville, South Carolina, the site of the Eastern District Tournament. I know it was just one of his pre-game ploys he was so good at. I was surprised he didn’t have his bedroom slippers on, like he had worn to the plate many times before. Show business!
I told him he was going to have a long, hard ride through us first and then perhaps go back home down I-59. Not sure he took that as sarcasm or the light-hearted joke it was intended to be. He didn’t laugh. It didn’t really matter. It was fun. Show business!
Rag’s 1985 team was the first Region 23 team to play in Grand Junction.
We would go on to become the first Hinds team to win the Region 23 tournament and the first Mississippi JUCO to win a the Eastern District Tournament and advance to the World Series in Grand Junction.
We won the Region 23 Tournament again in 1994 and 1995 and both teams played in the Division II World Series in Millington, Tennessee. We were also the first Mississippi team to play in the Division II World Series.
The 1999 season was our next Region 23 championship. It was unlikely, but it happened. A possibility, not a probability, but we pulled it off. Our post season goal was to “mess” up (edited) somebody else’s season and we did, including the number 1 team in the Division II polls, 3 times during our post-season run.
We had finished the season 16-31, suffering through a brutal month of March, but we got better along the way and an 11-13 record in the South Division got us in the tournament in the fourth spot. The other three teams in the tournament were Northwest Mississippi, the number 1 team in the Division II polls, who had hit 102 home runs and were playing on their little bandbox home field. This was our first round opponent; number 1 vs. number 500 as we joked about it. The other two teams were Co-Lin who had beaten us 11 times in row, yes, 11 times in a row, and Itawamba who had just won the Mississippi State Championship.
As if things weren’t bad enough already, our bus broke down (again) on I-55 north on the way to Senatobia. Game time was 1 pm, but we were sitting on the side of the highway while we waited over two hours for Hinds to get us another bus. Northwest didn’t volunteer to send us a bus from their campus. When the day was over, I bet they wished they had.
We finally arrived at the park at 12:45, 15 minutes from game time. NW coach Donny Castle met the bus and told me we had to get started because their were two games scheduled and the field didn’t have lights. I told him I knew that and to let us get of the bus and maybe “pee” or something and we’d get underway within a few minutes. We started the game with no lunch, no batting practice or pre-game infield, no fear and no excuses.
We won the opener 10-2 in seven innings; the 8-run rule after seven innings was in effect. They were devastated. We acted like we expected it. No dog pile or anything.
The next day we would play Co-Lin our arch-rival in the winner’s bracket game. That rivalry had been kind of one-sided for the past couple of seasons. We jokingly called the slump the Fortenberry Curse, which began in the same tournament two years before, when a baserunning blunder late in the game perhaps cost us a chance to get back to the championship game… in fact, I know it did, because we didn’t. 🙂
In the Co-Lin game, we were leading 4-3 in the top of the seventh inning and we got the first two runners on base and had our number 9 hitter coming to the plate. It was a textbook bunting situation from the Ron Polk Playbook. The Wolfpack pitching coach Pete Young went to the mound and I’m sure he told the pitcher to lay a fat one in there and they would take the easy out. I had a conversation with our hitter Kevin Cronin and we talked about doing just that. He wasn’t your typical nine-hole hitter. I just hid him down there and he got some really good pitches to hit.
The irony here is that Kevin was deaf. He was a lip reader and he understood just what he was asked to do and turned and walked calmly back to home plate to do it. I noticed that Pete was still at the mound talking about the bunt thing, so I changed my mind and called out for Kevin to stop and turn around. He was deaf. I don’t know why I said it.
But just like in the movies, he stopped and turned around. I felt like the great communicator. He told me just the other day (23 years later) that he turned around to see if I had changed my mind. We both had “EPSN” or something like that. I did some hand sign jibberish or something which when translated said, “Look for a fastball and hit it out of the park.” He did.
The pitcher laid that big fat, expecting-a-bunt-fastball, right down the middle of the plate at the belt and Kevin didn’t miss it. It reminded me of the movie, The Natural, when Roy Hobbs, or was it Robert Redford, hit that home run into the light towers and caused an explosion of the lighting system.
Kevin’s shot was headed right for the gigantic scoreboard in left field. I anticipated a loud noise when the ball hit the board. But there was a big net protecting the board and when the ball hit it, it just went “poof.” Just silence for a couple of moments, and then the explosion of our celebration.
Our great closer Clay Overby took over in the bottom of the seventh and threw about 20 unhittable sliders to secure the 7-3 win. (The slider is the best pitch in the game). The curse was over! And that loss would sting them a lot longer than those 11 losses in a row would ever sting us.
We played Northwest again the championship game and won 12-10. The next week we won the District playoffs in St. Louis and advanced back to Millington and finished fourth, one long rain delay from a possible shot at a national championship.
All together we won 4 Region 23 Championships and were the runners-up 5 times. Two those five second place finishes were in 2001 and 2002, two great teams that entered the championship game of the tournament undefeated and in each season we would lose two one-run games in the championship games. Those were two great teams that just might have ended up in the World Series, too. I believe all of our players would say the same.
Me: “To bring baseball back in to the conversation, we were undefeated in the Region 23 championship game both years, and…….”
Chris Reed: “Yea, that still gets under my skin. One game, that’s all we needed.”
Logan Owens: “Chris is right. Region 23 Championship game 2 years in a row and didn’t close. Still hurts.”
Stephen Hood: “I still cry at night about that Chris Reed.”
Hinds has a great history in the Region 23 Tournament. Here’s hoping the history continues this week.
Rick Clarke's Diary of a Mad Baseball Coach 