Morgan baseball provides plenty of drama at state semifinals

The first time the Trojans played Canyon View in 3A Bracket Play Monday, May 6, they lost by the razor-thin score of 1-3. 

The “Sleeping Beauty” Trojans awakened from their slumber to pull their bats out from under their beds, destroy their foe in games 2 and 3, and advance to the next round of the 3A state tournament. 

After rains tore apart the field at Kearns High School and rendered that surface “unplayable” UHSAA officials moved all of Morgan’s games that were scheduled at that field to BYU. 

The Trojans merely took the change in location all in stride for this 3A elimination game amid majestic peaks as a backdrop. What’s more is that the Trojans would be taking on big, bad Grantsville at BYU, too. 

Morgan might have lost to the Cowboys twice in region play, but in this elimination game, the Trojans were baseball’s version of the “The Big Bad Wolf” and would huff with fastballs from Camron Talbot, puff with RBI from seven different players and blow 3-loss Grantsville’s house down with four strikeouts, as the junior scattered six hits in six innings for a 7-5 upset win. 

This Cowboys team hadn’t met this Morgan team that ended the regular season with a 10-game win streak. Neither had an Emery team that handed Grantsville its first loss. 

In a new location at SLCC for this 3A elimination game against Emery, the Trojans were sluggish and trailed 0-5 going into the top of the sixth inning. 

But, the “Little Engine That Could” made it up that hill, too, scoring six runs in the final two innings to take a dramatic 6-5 win. 

Those two victories gave the Trojans at least one more game at this 3A state tournament and potentially, two shots at getting back to the 3A championship game.

Their next opponent on Thursday, May 8: Canyon View, the school that defeated the Trojans to start this double-elimination series of games. Was this “Groundhog Day”? Not exactly, but it probably felt that way to this Morgan team. 

The biggest difference between the first game against CV and this one was that the Trojans bats were already warm—their comeback win over Emery ended just four hours earlier—and it showed. Morgan took a 3-0 lead after two innings and never looked back in an 8-1 victory to force a winner-take-all Game 3 on Friday, May 9. 

It seemed like all of Morgan County was there at Cate Field for the decider. If the Trojans won this game, they’d be on to the 3A Championship Series to try to win something that hasn’t happened since 1951—a state championship in baseball. 

Through four innings, both the Trojans and Canyon View were knotted up at 3-3 at SLCC. In the bottom of the fifth, Canyon View scored the go-ahead run and went on to hand Morgan a 3-10 loss. 

It was still a storybook season for the Trojans, who finished with a 22-10 record, their best mark since the 2008-09 season. λ