Alabama reaches Babe Ruth semifinals

The Alabama Rawdogs defeated Canada 7-2 in the Babe Ruth World Series quarterfinal on Friday at Capaha Field.

Alabama began the game hot by scoring two runs in the bottom of the first inning, Ethan Santos scored on a line drive single by Fuller Musgrove and Jake Devalk scored off a sacrifice fly from Quincy Walters. Rawdogs manager Tony Hendrix said he was happy with how much energy the team played with despite being down players.

“Just a lot of energy like we play normally, we were able to tap the hits and pitch well,” Hendrix said. “We have to pitch down, we’re short some players obviously, it was a big team effort with everybody doing their jobs.”

The score remained at 2-0 until the fourth inning when Walters was able to score again off a Brody Tuinder single, an error by the Canada catcher allowed Justin Freind to score, Devalk drew a walk for a run and Cam Payne was able to bring the score to 6-0 off a wild pitch.

Tuinder also got the win on the mound for Alabama as he went all seven innings, finishing with seven strikeouts, one walk and just one earned run. Hendrix said he’s proud to have made it to the semifinals but expectations are not yet reached.

“We expected to be this far, we’re an older team and we've been doing this for a long time,” Hendrix said. “Our expectations every year are to go deep in the tournament, play hard, give it our best shot and hope the ball bounces our way, so far so good.”

With this quarterfinal win the team moves on to play Asia-Pacific Saturday at 10 a.m. at Capaha Field.

“They’re a lot like us, play with a lot of energy, they’re very gritty and they run the bases well,” Hendrix said. “They’re not a team that beats themselves, we’re gonna have to play our best game to beat them.”

On top of making it this far, the Rawdogs are stuck playing with just 12 players after a total of six have been declared ineligible to play by the Babe Ruth organization.

“It's definitely affected us as far as being on the field, we had a lot of leadership and some pitching that we had,” Hendrix said. Everybody has stepped up and we’re gonna accept what they say. We don't feel like we were wrong, still don’t feel like we were wrong. I think Babe Ruth handled it terribly and I’ve been a volunteer for 40 years up in their system. They should have stopped this before it ever happened. We went through three processes. The rosters were approved by headquarters. The rosters were approved before we got here and now there's a contradiction about the way the rule is read. The whole southwest, our whole region played by that rule. We had no idea about that or we would have never let that happen.”