MARION — Despite being the best team in the Frontier League's regular season, the Southern Illinois Miners had their season end in the Division Series round of the playoffs Saturday night.
River City held off the Miners, 3-2, to earn its third win in the best-of-five series. The Miners had won Friday night to extend the series to a fourth game, but couldn't force a fifth.
It's the fourth time in the last seven seasons that the Rascals have knocked the Miners out of the playoffs.
"Right now I'm feeling, honestly, like I've wasted the last year of my life," said Miners manager Mike Pinto. "There's no moral victory to a division championship, not any more. It doesn't mean anything."
The Miners were 63-33 in the regular season and West Division champions to earn the top seed in the playoffs. Joliet, the East Division champion, was also eliminated Saturday night by Evansville.
Joliet travels to Evansville to begin the championship series Tuesday night.
River City took a 2-0 lead in the fourth inning Saturday night after Miners pitcher Jarett Miller was drilled in the stomach by a line drive off the bat of Kyle Gaedele. The next batter, Jason Merjano, took Miller deep to right field.
"You could see the mark on his stomach," Pinto said of Miller. "He wore it pretty good. He tried to tough through it but a few pitches later a guy hits a two-run homer. We got out of the rest of it and our bullpen did a great job keeping us in it. Unfortunately the offense couldn't put it together."
The Rascals loaded the bases against Miller after the homer but Brooks Trujillo got out of the jam. Trujillo made a throwing error on a pickoff throw, however, in the fifth that led to Josh Ludy driving in River City's third run.
The Miners had tied it in the fourth when former teammate Dan Ludwig plunked Craig Massey with the bases loaded and Steve Marino followed with a single, although the Miners ran into a huge out as Massey kept running to third base with Alex De Leon already on the bag.
And the Miners appeared to tie it again in the seventh. Kurt Wertz Jr. was on first base after a walk and Brandon Cummins, who was pinch-hitting for designated hitter Willi Martin, popped a triple to the gap to score Wertz — except the Rascals appealed and Wertz was called out for missing second base.
"I had a pretty good view and I thought he missed it, too," Pinto said, adding that the umpire said he "missed it by a lot." The Frontier League uses three umpires in the postseason, but just two in the regular season.
Kyle Tinius, Chris DeBoo and Evan Mott kept the Rascals off the scoreboard after the fifth, but the Miners couldn't get anything going despite putting the tying run on base in all of the last five frames, including losing Cummins at the plate on a fielder's choice in the seventh.
In the ninth, Wertz appeared to redeem himself with a triple to right-center field with one out, but Cummins struck out and Riley Moore, pinch-hitting for fellow catcher Toby DeMello, grounded out to end the game and the season.
"Situational hitting," Pinto said. "We don't move a runner over, we don't get a guy in from third base multiple times, that's the story. We had plenty of chances not only to tie the game certainly but to take the lead and win it. Then the pressure's on them because now they've lost two in our ballpark. So we gave this game away tonight."
"So many things didn't go well tonight," Pinto added. "And you can say, 'Oh, that's baseball,' but no, that's not playing situational baseball and it came back to bite us tonight."
The Miners kept the series alive Friday night when Wertz and De Leon both hit mammoth home runs in a 7-2 victory. Rick Teasley pitched 6-1/3 innings with four strikeouts and one walk. Moore had two hits in the win.
But the hole was dug in O'Fallon, Missouri, where the Rascals scored four runs in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 1 to win 4-3 against closer Adam Lopez, then shut out the Miners 6-0 in the second game.
"We kicked the first game and the second game they just beat us," Pinto said. "We had our chances and just threw it away. I'm incredibly disappointed right now."
The Miners were without all-star shortstop Francisco Rosario for the postseason due to him leaving the team on his own as the series started.
"We were playing at River City which is a strong hitters park," Pinto explained. "With Francisco struggling offensively all year, we made the decision to start the series with an offensive lineup. When he saw he wasn't in the lineup, he simply quit and walked off the team. In my 12 years in pro baseball I have never seen anything like it. The most selfish act by a player I have ever heard of.
"We have placed him on the suspended list indefinitely."
